suggzy

Well now, following on from the recent release of the ‘Teaser Trailer’ here, in the form of the Prologue, I am pleased to tell you I have now published my second book, ‘Fifty’.

It’s been a labour of love and hate and lots of emotions in between those polar opposites, but I am pleased that I stuck with it. It is what I set out for it to be – an almost live account of the totally unexpected and unscripted events of the year in which I reached my fiftieth birthday. When I entered into the main business of the writing, on the 16th December 2023, I had no idea what was coming. All I knew was that life was not sitting quite right with me, and that some closer inspection of that was needed, and that I might hope to get another volume on the shelf, as a result. Now I have. In the end, what unwound as I thought, typed, edited and then finally closed the laptop was one big story, with multiple little stories included within it.

I have tried to keep the light bits light, and to help with that I have used some recollections of funnier stories as and when appropriate to break what might, at times, be a more challenging narrative to read than the froth and silliness that was Lunch in Moldova?

You’ll find what I hope is a good mix of comedy and ‘light tragedy’. That, in the final analysis, seems to be what a lot of my life has been and continues to be made up of. I have emerged through another year – some funny things happened, some sad things happened, and in the end I have done some learning about myself. So, that’s good, right?

I’m going to take a break, now, from all this exhausting introspection. My plan is to use to 2025 to try to write a Play. A farcical Play. It’s likely to be a less personal business, but won’t, I imagine, be as taxing as writing a novel. I do want to write a novel, but I think the time has to be right for me to do that. Hopefully the Universe will show me the point at which that work is to be begun. The Universe is, on the whole, to be trusted. It showed me it was time to write this one-year living memoir, and will, I hope, tap me on the shoulder, cough politely, and tell me it’s time to write a full on blockbuster, one day. Hopefully.

Before I pop the links up, and ask you to buy yourself a paperback or a Kindle copy, I want to pause to give thanks to two people. Naturally they are acknowledged in the book, but they stand strong and tall in my life. Firstly my wife, Sarah Wynne Kordas. She doesn’t stand that tall (she’s nearly five foot three) but she is unstoppable, and often finds the strength to keep me going when I don’t have it in myself, and picks me up when I am down. I am very lucky she chose me. Secondly my Best Friend, Swaggers – also known as the artist, Gary Dadd. The man who saved my life in Guatemala, 20 years ago, and who did an amazing job on producing the word portrait of me that is the cover to Fifty. You can learn more about his amazing portraiture and other works here: https://www.garydadd.com/

So, here we are. Firstly a link to Fifty, and then a link to Lunch in Moldova? If you finish up adding either of them to your bookshelf, then I wish you happy reading:

Have a happy Christmas and a blessed and blissful 2025.

Love,

Chris x

Having covered some fairly ubiquitous subjects this year, I find myself casting around for another.

How it took me quite so long to realise that eating is something that everyone who is currently alive does, is a bit of a distressing vote of no confidence in the state of my intellectual acumen. That notwithstanding, it is something I the author and you the readership share in common, so we’ll go with it. Whilst I am on the subject of stuff that goes down your throat, we might pause to note that the article I wrote back in May on the subject of drinking, and my long, slow, and ultimately doomed relationship with it was, well, it was the singlemost popular thing I have ever written. 232 of you read that inside 24 hours. I can only conclude you are all absolute curtain-twitchers, with a penchant for gossiping about me over the garden fence. Fine. Clearly all I need to do, then, to become a popular writer, is bare the innermost agonies and tortures of my flawed existence on the page. Super. None of that light and frothy stuff over the last seven years got you going, then? Unbelievable. I blame the internet.

Food is on my mind. I just had tea. A microwave vegetable lasagne for one, and then a bowl of All Bran with some fat free yoghurt. Later, I shall treat myself to a couple of low-fat Rich Tea and a mug of Horlicks. Remind me to tell you my Horlicks story, by the way – it’s rude, but you’ll laugh.

Dull though that meal was, it is was a significant one, actually. It was a meal that has to be my last food for a significant amount of time. Don’t worry – nothing bad is going to happen – at least I hope it isn’t. No, it’s simply the case that I am having an operation tomorrow morning, ahead of which I must not eat for a minimum of 6 hours. In reality, it will probably prove to be about 13 or 14, I reckon, as I am largely a habitual creature. I had the option of the rather enjoyable vegetable keema and pea curry I made yesterday (baked it – worked well, might try that again), as there is a second portion available. However, it has made me fart quite magnificently all day (proper, tearing a sheet apart farts – you could have powered something with them), and I am worried that I will fart whilst ‘under’ tomorrow, put the surgeons off, and they’ll make a mistake and accidentally cut something out of me that I actually need.

LIVE UPDATE: 48 hours have marched on. I needed (and have now had) my gallbladder taking out, as it has, in middle age, gone on the blink. I don’t know how well it served me for the first 47.3 years of life, but when it developed something called biliary colic back in later June, I thought I might be dying, as I was in so much incredible pain. I’m always a bit circumspect about talking about pain, in a woe-is-me-it-was-so-awful way, because I realise that blokes in particular have a tendency to over egg the pudding (a little food reference there – this is all coming together nicely, isn’t it?) when it comes to illness and pain. However, having discussed the matter with a few women I know who have been ‘de-gallbladdered’ but also borne several children, they all assure me they would rather go through the process of birthing all of those children consecutively than go through a single additional second of gallbladder and gallstone pain. So I now feel quite justified in the fact that just four months or so ago I was lying on the ground in A&E, crying my eyes out, in what I considered to be agony.

Top tip on painkillers, by the way? Everyone assumes, in such a crisis of pain, that morphine is the pinnacle of analgesia. Mentioned in a hushed voice, the stuff of Thomas de Quincey – it’s considered the promised land, for those of us who are hurting. It may very well be just that, for very many people – but not necessarily. I had two or three good mouthfuls whilst they worked out what to do with me, and aside from tasting oddly agreeable, it did nothing for me. However, the real joy came some time later, when I was admitted, and I was given paracetamol in liquid form, intravenously. Now that, truly, was the badger. Not only did it get to work on alleviating the pain, but it also helped me give rather less of a shit about the predicament in which I found myself. So much so that I am considering getting a case in for Christmas. Does anyone ‘know a guy’? I do find it curious that something one blithely takes in tablet form for a headache or a toothache can have such a transformative effect in a liquid format. One lives (gladly) and learns.

Anyway, yes, so the organ of evil is gone from my gut. I’m told that, when they chopped it open, it contained no bile whatsoever (judging by the news, that’s all soaked into Tory MPs, now – there is none left), but just stacks and stacks of gallstones. Had I changed my diet in favour of anything much fatty, since the summer, it would probably have edged another one of those rocks out into the duct and crippled me once more. All I was left with was bag or marbles, the like of which I possessed as a little boy.

To stagger back in the direction of our main theme – food and eating – this predicament was caused by a sequence of changes I had made in my diet, over the last two years or so. But before I focus on that, we need to go back in time a little.

The subject of diets and dieting has been discussed, exposed, decried and re-invented a million times over. If you live in the First World, and you are not fat, then you know someone who is. Guarantee it. We are now so utterly desperate to reverse the trend that we have been hoodwinked into either buying subscriptions for boxes of expensive ‘selected for you’ ingredients and recipe cards so we can cook stuff we were all perfectly capable of looking up in the first place, with a mere atom or two of effort. It seems to be that, or various different compounds of protein dust are supposed to take the place of plates of actual food.

I’m not sneering because I am not immune to the lures of dieting.

Those of you who know me in real life, or through Facebook etc. will recall that 2012-2013 was a bit of a transformative year, for me, as I managed, through exercise and diet, to knock off a final total of 102lb. To some extent this was done through walking and then running about, with lots of water drunk, but I also went the low carb route to shedding the stones. Not quite the Atkins approach to things, exactly, but the fact that at that time in my life I still ate meat was quite helpful. I didn’t fight shy of the bacon and the sausages, no, but equally I became big chums with broccoli, cauliflower and pak choi, along the way. Essentially, and I am sure you know this, if you lay off the carbohydrate, your body doesn’t have it in the way between you and the consumption of your excess stores of fat. Stick with it, you’ll finish up in ketosis, and the chub will fall of you. It is, undoubtedly, not for everyone. I found it miraculous, but that’s me.

But then, on January 1^st 2020, I became a vegetarian, and joined SWK’s team in so doing. It was a decision (an ethical one, mostly) that had been coming for some time. Trouble is, and was, that it came with the arrival of the pandemic, and an awful lot of sitting down. Exercise didn’t come to a halt, or anything, but it reduced. With the advent of a veggie diet, the reduction of one’s carbohydrate became tricky. And I ate too much sugar. I have craved sugar ever since I gave up alcohol – it’s getting better, but it’s always there – I understand a lot of people have the same issue.

So – allowing for my vegetarianism, I decided to return to the low carb route again, back in the late Spring of this year, to reverse some of the weight gain. And, alas, it backfired on me quite spectacularly. The reason why? Well – I’m not 100 per cent sure on this, but basically the fat in my diet, which had been fine the first time, had suddenly gained horrendous prominence, it collected in my late gallbladder, and turned into rocks. I went boom – and that was dreadful.

As I type this, I am just eating stuff I feel like and getting better again. My overall size and shape will be addressed once I am in state of wellness and no pain. It’s on the list, as so many things are, in my little life.

Food and eating isn’t always about diets and the desire for the physically transformative, of course. It’s a simple, daily set of activities that we all engage in a range of different ways. It extends across a vast range – from a bowl of cornflakes in front of the telly, to a Michelin starred meal for eight in a restaurant, costing thousands.

I didn’t really start cooking for myself on a regular basis until I left University. And it didn’t take long for me to realise that it represented a creative outlet, for me. Indeed, I would go as far as to say that it had pretty good effects on my mental health, particularly once I began living on my own, at age 25, and a certain amount of traditions and routines around the preparation of meals began to build up. Friday night became a sacrosanct affair, for the most part. Home from work – beer, cook spicy food – wine – telly, rabbit on at my mate Nick whilst pissed (over the ‘phone), then eventually drop off on sofa.

Here and there, a repertoire began to build. A store of favourites were filed away in the grey matter. It became the case that particular days were for particular sorts of meals. Some seasonality to this emerged. My burgeoning love of travel started to inform the stuff I made up (which is to say flavour combinations, or modes of composition that I became aware of). Recipes, by and large, have rarely informed that which finished up being served. I suppose I glance at the odd one just to be vaguely assured that something I fancy making is ‘on the right lines’, but I’m not a measurer and a worrier about sequences, timings and what have you. That tends to be a blessing and a curse, of course. Now and again, I will knock up something that hints at the likely existence of a kind and benevolent God, to whom I should give thanks for my gifts. On other occasions, I sit and chew my way through something truly execrable, having not seen inspiration bless me that day. Under such circumstances, I have the aspect about me of a grumpy 6-year-old, and am less than genial company as a result.

I like conventional meals, and I also like odd ones. These days, whole wheat pasta, pesto and grated cheddar is an absolute guaranteed midweek winner  – certainly have it every week. From pan to gob in 12 minutes – lovely. In the same vein, I also like my ‘take’ on a French Bread Pizza – composed thusly:

1. Slice a baguette in half, lengthways. Brush with oil, and place in oven for 5-6 mins.
2. Slice up a ball of mozzarella
3. Mash up a can of pilchards in tomato sauce
4. Slather the fish gunge over the toasted surface of the bread, and finish with slices of the mozzarella
5. Season heavily (I am one on those ‘auto-condimentors’) and return to oven until cheese is blistered and bubby
6. Eat (in my case, to the background disgust of Sarah The First)

What do we think of that one, then?

Given the proportion of my life (before I started marrying people) where I spent time preparing food and working in the kitchen on my own, there were inevitable incidents when flying sols. My hands bear a couple of decent-sized scars from those days including a very neat-looking horseshoe on the index finger of my left hand, when a delicate wine glass exploded in the washing up bowl, leading to a scene not unlike this one:

At least, that’s roughly how I remember it. I also have a thumb with a couple of decent nicks out of it, following my adventures in chopping up red cabbage (another one of life’s low-carb joys – just keep your digits out of the way).

On one quite memorable occasion, I finished up with a different sort of injury, at the other end of my body, to the amusement of many people I have explained it to, since it happened, about 17 years ago.

For a while, way back then, I was working in Cambridge and living in West Norfolk. Mostly, the working day was supported by a simple commute on the train, but now and again it was necessary to travel to a different site, by car. And so, one Winter evening, I found myself driving home in quite heavy snow, via the supermarket, so as to make my evening’s catering a bit easier. I popped in and grabbed myself a shop-bought curry, rice, and Naan bread, along with a beer to drink whilst the oven did its stuff. Home in on what was becoming rather a white-out of an evening. Oven on, food in, beer open, shorts on, telly on, and a fine evening in prospect.

After the required 35 minutes was up, I gathered up a plate, and a fork, and scraped my rice onto the former, using the latter. I then reached into the oven and fished out my main dish. As I did so, it buckled under its own weight, there in my hand, and the flimsy package bent back onto itself, and disgorged its fiery contents directly downwards, and onto my left foot. The pain was instant, and incredible. My presence of mind kicked in, for once, and I raced out of the kitchen door, into the falling snow – there was a good three inches on the ground, by then. I hop-skipped-ran a circuit of the top of the garden, like a little girl warming up for an intense hopscotch match at morning break. The relief was just as instant, as the snow got to work on freezing my burning flesh. With the worst of things over, I limped back into the house for some follow-up care of my wound. I then rather moodily had a somewhat unexciting dinner of rice and bread, before going to bed.

The following morning, I popped into the spare bedroom to pick up some papers for work, before I took my singed, blistered and weeping foot for a trip to the office. I chanced to look out of the window, and down to the garden below. After my foray of the evening before, the snow had stopped – although not in time to cover up the map of my adventures. So it was, as the snow gradually melted away, that for the next 48 hours or so the garden bore a quite bright orange circle, about 14 feet in diameter.

I suppose this proves I don’t really need to leave the country to hit upon injury or misadventure. It was far from the only food-related tragedy to strike me, in adult life. I still recall, all too well, the dawning morning after a friend’s birthday in London. Around the same point in time, if I remember rightly?

Anyway, during the day before, Swaggers, the then Mrs Swaggers and I had taken in the Bodyworks Exhibition in East London, and then treated ourselves to a late lunch of a Brick Lane curry.

During the middle part of the evening, the resultant campolybacter food poisoning struck Swaggers down first. He was pouring with sweat (last time I ever loaned him a shirt, I recall), and was dragged off to home base, whilst I continued to enjoy the party. I undertook to meet him there the next day, when I was to collect my car, and drive back up to East Anglia.

I dropped off on a sofa at my friend’s house at around 1.00am, or so. I then woke an hour later, having realised I was sleeping alongside a cat. Big error. I like cats, but I am horribly allergic to them, and my asthma was beating a hearty tattoo my chest. The only solution, then, was to leave the property, and start walking in the cool air of the morning so that things settled down again. I reasoned that, eventually, the Tube would re-start, and all would be well.

And it would have been well, sort of. It would have been well, had it not been a Sunday morning in East London, about 12 miles from where I needed to be. It would have been well, had it not transpired to be four hours before I could get the Tube to White City. And it would have been well, had my own version of the food poisoning that had struck my colleague not announced itself in my trousers at roughly 3.00am, as I walked through the throngs of people leaving London’s various ‘nite spots’.

I spent more than three hours, navigating West, via the maps in bus shelters (none of your GPS-for-all, back then) whilst enduring multiple, incredible stomach cramps, in an effort to avoid further, hideous embarrassment. Ordinarily, the beeps of passing minicabs would have meant sweet relief – but let’s be honest, how do you broker a fare discussion when you are sweating poison, and smell lightly of a poorly-digested Lamb Bhuna? You don’t (at least I didn’t). At least, as time wore on, the number of clubbers ran down, and I had less company to explain myself to.

It would be wrong to say that things every actually got better, because they didn’t. Some semblance of the dawn started to rise, and I found a shop that was open, so just brazened it out to buy a bottle of water with the change in my pocket. And finally, finally, I managed to get the first Tube service of the day, crumpled into a seat as far away from any other humanity as I could find. Further staggering followed, together with explanations at the intercom outside the flats where Swaggers lived at the time, as I woke a couple of people up rather earlier than expected, on their day of rest. I showered my aching and foul body off – put my clothing into the sturdiest bags I could find, and into the boot of my car, which I then drove all the way to Norfolk, with all of the windows open – partly to compete with the smell, and partly so as to keep myself awake. I then went to bed for four days, and lost a stone in weight.

All of this has taken a rather grisly turn, hasn’t it? Sorry about that – I didn’t set out to discuss this subject in quite this way, but there you are – reminiscences are many and varied, the older you get. It might be a bit more fun to mention some of my Tip Top Eating Experiences, maybe? Good and bad ones:

1. Ham and chicken noodles in a noodle bar in Kyoto, with our old chum Benj (you will remember him – I sang at his wedding). This remains the singlemost delicious bowl of food I have every consumed in my life, which probably has something to tell us about the fact that complicated and expensive does not necessarily pass as the byword for amazingly good. Also notable as this was a trip where language was often a problem – the food arrived only after we had looked up the Japanese for “you choose for us, please?” On a different occasion, I got what I am going to describe as a chopped liver curry. That was very far from the most delicious plate of food I have ever consumed. It’s in the bottom ten – but for context, I once ate a can of dog food, to win a bet.

• Fricasseed bear, with a pint of honey beer. In a Medieval restaurant in Tallinn, Estonia. Something eye-watering like thirty quid, which these days would horrify me, but hey, life is nothing without experiences to draw upon, and witter about on the internet, now is it?

• Nine-course, Michelin-starred Thai meal in Copenhagen. With wine. For two. Something stupid like £350. Most expensive meal I have ever paid for, if you discount my occasional weddings. Curried red lobster ice cream is a thing, it transpires, and a very delicious thing it is too. All very jolly – feel no need to ever do such a thing ever again, however. We’re having frozen pizza tonight – £1.75 each, plus toppings from the fridge.

• Rotting shark at a (50%) Icelandic wedding, washed down with ice cold shots of Brennivin distilled spirit. Notable for being a dish one could smell in the open air, from 90 feet away. It was utterly, utterly, disgusting.

• Andouillette sausages. In France, on two separate occasions. For some reason, I imagined that a second go might marry my taste buds to the dish rather more than my first one. It did not. I’m all for making use of the whole animal, if one is going to eat meat, but making sausages from arseholes is only ever going to take the diner down a cul-de-sac. A cul-de-sac that smells and tastes of poo. Oh dear.

Just to finish up, and to give us the illusion of an essay, rather than a series of silly autobiographical tales cobbled together, a couple of thoughts on a developing area of shop-bought foodstuffs? As a veggie, which I think I will remain, now, I have a healthy interest in ‘fake meat’. Protein/plant-based replacements, often to be found in sausage and burger form. Some of these, I have to say, are extraordinarily good. Full of taste, moisture and flavour. The underlying science in the delivery of these products is clearly jumping forward at a great rate of knots.  It must be the case that supply is meeting demand. Just a handful of statistics from a range of sources will tell you that 10-12% of the UK population is now vegetarian. It’s a bit of a golden time, for people like me, given this change is happening alongside brilliant developments in the brewing of non-alcoholic beer.

But there is greater potential for what sometimes gets (rather lazily) referred to as Frankenstein Food. I’ve been reading about it this week. There are countries in the world that have given state sanction to products based on meat grown in a lab. You can, for example, buy a burger in Singapore which is made of meat (chemically, it’s the same), but does not come from an animal that was killed so you could eat it. This is even more interesting. Daisy the cow produces 300l of methane every day (apologies, it’s all gone a bit tasteless again). Methane heats the world up. A lot. Ergo, if we reduce the number of Daisys, together with a lot of other animals grown simply for their meat, then we might remain above the level of the sea, at the end of the century. Alright, yes, we need to do a heap of other things as well, but it would be a very obvious starting point. Humanity staying alive versus the future of McDonalds? No contest, right?

The trouble is, of course, our innate human selfishness. Will someone whose livelihood is conditional upon keeping livestock volunteer to reduce their number ‘for the common good’? Unlikely. Much easier to pass the problem on to farmers as yet unborn. Will the industry growing the replacement meat work with governments and their economic plans to make this stuff affordable? My instinctive answer is no, they won’t. Everyone, whilst they are alive, is motivated to a greater or a lesser extent by the accrual of money, and resources in general. That goes for poor people, just as much as it goes for the stratospherically rich people. The need to strive invites inequality, I’m afraid. If the playing field remains so very far from flat, then everything like this will remain an innovation, rather than a solution. That is not cheering. I cannot really do anything about it, other than to try and adjust my behaviour in as ethical a way (defined only by me) as I can. That helps with the legacy one leaves, and stops one worrying so much as to never sleep again. Will I ever recycle enough stuff, or eat enough lentils to reverse the effect of the flights I have taken (and will doubtless still take) in my life? Probably not. But, if I don’t try at all, then it must mean the option is there for everyone not to try. If they all don’t, then we all just die out, and I don’t really take any consolation from knowing that will happen after I have myself died (probably in an ‘unseasonal heatwave’, in 40-odd years from now).

So – small changes, undertaken by everyone = net positive contribution to the least-worse-case scenario. Maybe.

As to whether I will ever raise a lab-grown piece of meat to my lips? Dunno. Innate curiosity probably means I will, yes. After all, I still eat fish, now and again (yes, I have left it to my last paragraph to mention that). Fish think and feel, so I am far from saintly in allowing them to be murdered (and battered, afterwards – how fucking cruel is that?) for my delectation and delight. But then none of us is an impact-free organism. Only the nature and the breadth of the impact is something we can allow to vary. It’s up to you. It’s up to me. It always has been.

Right, now I’ve cleared things up on the whole booze front, let’s pick a different flavour for the fourth essay and ramble of the year. Something a little lighter in treatment, but no less ubiquitous in its impact.

Work. Something in which I have been engaged in one capacity or another for just over 31 years. Something which, at the moment, is an object of fascination for me, because I largely undertake it about 12 feet from my toilet, and about 18 feet from where I sleep at night. I first ‘worked from home’ about 15 years ago, when I was in the employ of the University of East Anglia, and had to commute about 550 miles a week in an occasionally unreliable Rover 400, to and fro along the A47, in the company of quite a lot of farm machinery, across the upper central belt of Norfolk. This (the commute) was something I did for about three years, and I did not care for it. It ate up days and then weeks and in the end I suppose months of my life. It stressed me out. It made me fat, and by the end of it, I was smoking six cigarettes a day whilst driving. Not really the way ahead.

The facility to work from home existed perfectly well, and we had a small office space in the little spare bedroom of the cottage Sarah the First and I lived in. It was cosy, stuff worked nicely, and I found it relaxing and productive, when I was permitted to work that way. However, my boss, back then, was an untrusting and miserable lady – she didn’t like me, and I can’t say I was wild on her. Having a sense of humour is, of course, not compulsory, but I’m always a bit taken aback when I meet people with the inability to crack a smile at anything. I daresay that some of the people that have worked with me across the years would describe me as the opposite – I find the joke in everything, and am doubtless not serious enough by their standards. Okay, fine, but I suspect that I stand a better chance of cultivating positive professional relationships with my slightly cock-eyed approach, than one who enters the office under a perpetual cloud, works unnecessarily long hours and takes pretty much zero pleasure from any of it. We will, I’m afraid, all be dead soon enough. When that final day applies to me, I suspect I will not lie there, pondering the Great Beyond, wincing at the memory of how I should probably have been a bit more serious. I’d rather face my annihilation with, if perhaps not a cheesy grin (‘cause, you know, dying and all that), then at least the contemplation that I had managed to have a bit of a giggle, and had done some fun stuff. I have, and I am going to tell you about some of it.

I remember very clearly being called to the Boss’s office for one of our joyless ‘catch-ups’, where she said (and this is verbatim), “I want to row back somewhat from working from home arrangements”.

‘Row back’. Yep.

I nodded deferentially – I don’t really care to argue with a brick wall – it just tires you out. Inside my head, I thought “I need to live nearer to where I work, and I need to both live and work a long, long way away from you”. A few months into the year that followed, I did. But not before commuting by car posed its last real threat to my life, when on a sunny Spring morning, as I enjoyed one of the rare bits of dual carriageway on my route into work, a crow fell out of tree, and rolled drunkenly through the sky in the direction of my windscreen. If it wasn’t already dead (we shall never know), it was by the time it impacted upon my wing mirror at 70mph and tore it clean off. Quite the brush with death, eh?

It wasn’t the kamikaze birdlife that drove me to desire home-working; it was the cost and the time involved in commuting. It’s always seemed to me, as one who’s only occasionally been paid very well, that so often the first act of the working day was to hand over money to get there – and that was only really ever the cause of misery. Much worse when driving, of course, and so after the incident with the crow had passed into memory, there began what’s been 13 years of travelling to work by public transport. Trams got me to work in Sheffield and Nottingham, and these days it’s the train into Leicester – memorably, for that year in Qatar, it was a legendary minibus. I suppose it’s a little bit odd that, right now (early Autumn 2021), the few occasions on which I have to go to go onto campus are characterised by a desire to drive there, because of the pandemic and masks situation we have arrived at. I suppose that will likely melt away again, in time. We’ll see, eh?

Of course, I can always find a frustration, and over that decade and more, it’s been the marriage between my impatience and the reliability of public transport. My ethical code says that I should always seek to get on a bus, a tram, a train, etc. Alright, in the UK it can be a bit of a rip-off, unless you are canny about when you travel and what ticket you buy, but, of course, someone else does the driving and you can park yourself with a book, some music, etc. etc. Broadly speaking I have benefitted from this, although some of the days when it all went wrong, and one arrived home or, worse, at work, drenched, late, and full of murderous thoughts do tend to live long in the memory. There’s something very British about swallowing down one’s rage whilst pressed into the armpit of another random punter on a rail replacement bus service. Truth be told, if my last dozen working years mostly start by getting up, making coffee, walking a dog or two and then cracking off with my work with a view of the garden and slippers on my feet – then I shall not complain a bit. Well, not very much, anyway. It’s entirely regrettable that the Covid hideousness has brought about this state of affairs – of course it is. And I guess my personal circumstances and ability to work alone in my home make me luckier than many people, so I do count my blessings.

Needless to say, the working from home thing does bring its obvious disadvantages. There is an inevitable blurring of the boundaries of home and work, but I can live with that when it’s lined-up against the costs to me in time and money when it comes to tootling into work. Additionally, I’d argue that when I am at home, my employer gets more out of me. Even though we Iive only 12 miles or so from the University, it still eats up a good 80-90 minutes of the day to attend the workplace, and often whilst I am there I am only on the same Teams calls I would have been on had I been sat in my study at home, where I am typing this. Given that time back, after walking the dogs at the start of the day, I am able to start earlier and, when I choose to, it’s no real stress to carry on working and finishing things up whilst dinner is cooking. It didn’t take long for me to make the conscious decision not to plug the laptop in and carry on working after a commute home. That feels both pragmatic and fair, right? It means some of my work gets delayed, but if my employer wants me to present myself at work, then they lose some of my time. Gains on the swings are lost on the roundabouts (literally, in this case).

Lots of other things go in my favour, though. All those parcels? I’m here to greet their arrival, if SWK isn’t. Dog minders? Dog walkers? Not required, as the hounds can park themselves at my feet and sigh and fart discontentedly all day long, if they choose. I can take a more liberal approach to my wardrobe. The coffee’s better. If, as he will do next week, the chimney sweep is coming to visit (quite excited about that), then I can greet him, point cluelessly to the chimney, then go back to work in under ten seconds. It’ll start to sound like I don’t do anything all day – not the case – I have worked harder, in totality, in the last 18 months that at any other time in my 26 years since I left University. I have worked until late evening more times than I can count, but I sort of don’t mind, because I am secretly quite proud about everything I have managed to achieve. The fact that I have done it with one eye on the Test Match, or whilst supervising plumbers and builders is pretty cool. Without home working, the bungalow would be far less developed, after a year and a half, than it is.

Some of the negatives that others have experienced, I am conscious I don’t have to, and haven’t had to. I have no children to educate. I live in a place that is quiet, and I have a dedicated room to work in that I like, rather than a kitchen table that others have to perch at, alongside me. Being stuck in a place where you just can’t be productive must be grim – I’m in doubt about that. Some of those people will be at it forever more, because there is no longer an office to go to. That, in turn, means there is no opportunity to socialise in the healthy way that the workplace sometimes provides. At least on the days when I do have to schlep down the A6, there are some people there to share a coffee, a giggle and a gossip with. I don’t mind being self-reliant for the majority of the time, but the face to face stuff is still nice when it adds to the experience of working life.

All told, I’d say I have had a pretty good result. I think I have most of what I imagined I could have when I first craved the comfort of home during the working day, a decade and a half ago.

But it was not always this way, of course. I used to go to work every day. Sometimes in a car, sometimes on a train or a tram.. now and again, on an aeroplane. And, although it’s been a life mostly spent in and around education, it has not been without variety. It’s had its ups and its downs.

For instance? On my first day at Cambridge, in my first proper job in my own proper office, two significant things happened. The first? The folks charged with wiring-in a phone line managed to get mixed up at the exchange on the end of the street. Consequently, for much of my first week, I found I was getting calls for the ladies’ hairdressers at the end of the street. Fair to say a chap doesn’t learn an awful lot about Quality Assurance and the process of auditing when fending off Mrs Jones’s questions about her cut and colour. The second? During my first morning I attended a meeting with my new boss. I had, by then, had three cups of coffee and no breakfast, having been too nervous to engage with solids. As a consequence, my stomach was starting to gripe rather uncontrollably. At a particularly quiet moment in what were pretty serious proceedings, it voiced its complaints even more loudly than before, and everyone within about 15 feet would have sworn blind that the new bloke had had the temerity to release a loud and sonorous fart. “That’s not how we do things around here, old boy” their expressions told me. I was younger then, of course, and didn’t have a quip available to lighten the mood. I just reddened, and wondered how long I was going to last in the job.

Meetings at that place were generally great, though. One came to enjoy them more and more as the weeks became months and years, and one had a stronger sense of the ground beneath one’s feet. During Wednesday afternoons, my colleagues and I all attended meetings of the General Board’s Education Committee, where we had the duty of minuting the discussions, and on some occasions contributing to them. They were often something of a test of the survival of the fittest. By the time we got to June and July, after lunch, the meetings would often go on for as much as three or four hours, because no one had any classes to go and teach, and because academics like to talk. And talk. And talk. The steady murmur of opinions as the Sun moved ‘round an already warm room meant that more senior members often simply nodded off. Some were heard to snore. Conversely, in the Winter months, the room was generally freezing. Coats remained on, coffee was nursed, and people suddenly developed the ability to summarise their views rather more efficiently. When the heating packed up altogether, you could actually see the hot air being issued.

The humour was also splendid. I recall a long discussion one day about the relative numbers of students going on from undergraduate to postgraduate study in particular subjects. In lots of the Faculties and Departments, the success rate was pretty high. In others, the kids seemed to do their three years, and then leave. In Philosophy, for instance, very few students indeed ‘stayed on’. I was sat next to Prof. Parker that day. Stubbly, shambly and always in a cardigan that was more holes than stitches, he was generally one for a smart remark – he was very much a counter-culture type, and hailed from the School of Music. On hearing the distressingly low statistics from Philosophy, he leaned into my ear and said, “It comes as no surprise to me – fucking Wittgenstein couldn’t get a 2:1 from this place”. I squeaked with laughter and had to spend quite some time mopping up coffee from my notes, having delivered it there through my nose.

Delivering humour through the written word has often proved a more risky affair. Never mind the fact that stuff you write down doesn’t have the benefit of the nuance of your facial expression being available, to demonstrate how serious you were actually being – although that’s a perennial problem – I have pissed off hundreds of people when I thought I was being ‘chirpy and collegiate’. No, I was thinking more about our old chum ‘Reply to All’. It’s been done to death, as an online meme, and we all have our war stories on this subject. Nothing gladdens the heart of the office worker more than the arrival of the ‘recall request’ e-mail on Outlook, that signals someone, somewhere, has dropped a bollock. I always read the content, I’m afraid. Life’s too short not to indulge in some schadenfreude.

My own heart-stopper came on Monday 9^th December 2013. A date which has rather stuck in the memory – you’ll shortly understand why.

I was working on quite a lot of international stuff at the time. Mostly European Higher Education partnerships. We had a potential new partner about to join the fold, with a guaranteed income of about £400,000 proposed for the coming three years, for my paymasters. It was an independent Italian College – pretty well-to-do – History of European Art, Fine Art, international students from wealthy families in California – you get the picture, right?

They had been somewhat bullish, during the negotiations. Impatient, in fact – as other colleagues seemed to have given them a few rather informal promises that we now had to be a bit more clear and direct about, so as to remain within the boundaries of the law. This did not go down well. Repeated counter-statements arrived about how we had to authorise them, right now, to advertise their students would get our degree for their efforts. Their business was being affected, bureaucracy of this sort was unacceptable, did we know who they were? Blah, blah and blah.

By and large, I was able to deflect all this stuff, and propose a series of ‘fudges’ whilst the big stuff was concluded, but I arrived that Monday morning to find a particularly up itself and aggressive communication had arrived on Saturday morning. Unthinkingly, I sent a reply out to my colleagues which, amongst a range of sentiments, also expressed my view that.. “these people might imagine themselves to be the Mafia, and as such in a position to push us around as they see fit, but in fact they hold no power whatsoever, and we should stop cossetting them and demand they take this important work a sight more bloody seriously. I have had it up to here with their lofty demands of me, and us, and someone should tell them that.”

Alas someone had told them that. Me. One should never get too angry before a straightening cup of Monday morning coffee. I had not forwarded my remarks – no, I had replied to what I had been told, and expressed my rather hot views to their owner, Principal, and Director of Operations, as well as half the hierarchy of my own University.

Within about 90 seconds or so, I started to get a bit of feedback from my colleagues. One of them kindly asked if this was part of some brilliant strategy on my part (thanks, Angela, your faith in me was always touching). Others just said “LOL – you know you Cc-d them all, right?” Yes, thank-you for letting me know, though. My boss ‘popped up to see me’ and gently suggested I should perhaps take the rest of the day off. I figured accepting this olive branch was the right move, before someone asked me to resign.

By the time I returned to work, it was as if it had never happened. The matter was quietly dropped. In fact (I learned this some time later), my boss had used the evidence of my feverish outburst to politely indicate that the partner institution might be wise to take heed of the pressure they were putting his staff under, and make their demands more reasonable.

Got away with that one. I really did.

Like a lot of us, I have pulled more than a few stunts down the years, and got away with it. Never had so much as a written warning, in fact. I like to think it is my innate charm, and eagerness to please people, but I’m in fact sure it’s just been blind luck. Hopefully my run will continue for another 12 years, and I can retire quietly as if none of it was real. Probably for the best that I never made really high office, although you never know what might still happen.

There have been some oddities – like the time I came back from a meeting to find someone had been installed on my office who had driven to the University, directly, following his release from prison in the North West of England that morning. He had got it into his head that the miscarriage of justice that had befallen him emanated from mendacious evidence given by a member of my staff. As such, he expected me to broker a meeting between them, so that honour could be served. He didn’t have a gun or anything, and was only about five feet tall and more tearful than lethal, but, well, it was a small office and I was not unhappy when a nice big security guard intervened.

On another day, some years before these events occurred, I contrived to bring about a situation where I missed a bus from London to South Yorkshire with 18 MBA students in tow – a number of them quite drunk after having spent the day in the pub watching an India vs Pakistan cricket match. The £1,400 charge on my company credit card took a bit of explaining, but they are all still alive, and thriving.

I’ve slept in my office. I have locked myself into a closed-off wing of a hospital. I have attempted to bump start a company car (in reverse) on an icy estate, by pushing it, standing outside the car with one hand on the steering wheel and my other hand on the brake pedal. That one was good – it got away from me (funny, that) and came to rest in some bushes. I was trying to work out what to do when a bunch of binmen turned up, pulled me out and produced some jump leads to resolve the issue. Thanks for that, chaps.

I’m sure such cases of professional misadventure have dogged a lot of us. It’s just they always seem rather more prominent on my internal, unpublished CV than instances of smooth and untroubled success. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve done some good stuff, here and there, and have made lots of friends through work. I’ve held some positions of genuine responsibility and got bigger and better jobs off the back of them. I’ve given speeches, handed out degree certificates and been entrusted with recruiting students in foreign countries, armed only with an inappropriate wardrobe choice (I specialise in wearing tweed at the Equator) and whatever my wits would come up with next. It’s been fun.

One thing I do wonder about, though, is where else life might have taken me. Beyond a certain point in one’s life, the trappings of that life and the need to pay for them becomes the reason to stay in one’s job and not risk a change of career. I’m always quite impressed by people who manage to bring about such a fundamental change in their work and hang onto their home at the same time. I lack the imagination, I fear, and in any case, I am not sure what else I could realistically do. Lifeguard, professional footballer or wine taster are all out, let’s face it. I am the classic example of a generalist. I have a comprehensive command of precisely nothing whatsoever. I can do a bit of a lot of things. In some ways, it’s been a bit of a virtue, and I am perhaps lucky I have never had to choose to do a particular thing. Nowadays, all of the people in my line of work who are younger than I am seem to have Master’s degrees, or even PhDs, and make use of the vernacular you’d see in a Bluff Your Way In Business index. In their world, things are managed ‘on the ground’, one ‘reaches out’ to other colleagues, and they are generally in the habit of ‘just checking in’, with you at around 4.58pm. Meetings are routinely ‘slotted in’ during the hours of 12.30pm and 2.00pm (don’t get me started – what happened to lunch, for goodness sake?) I’m awfully glad I do not have to get involved in all of that competitive nonsense – it’s really very tiresome. It’s another very good reason to work from home whenever one can. Perhaps the fact that I don’t (and won’t) get involved makes me look like the sorts of dinosaurs I remember from my own early working days? Maybe we all finish up looking like that at work as we get older and the youth starts sporting? Maybe, just maybe, I think about this sort of thing too much.

I don’t hate work, but I don’t love it or live for it, either. It’s turned out to be a series of jobs, rather than a career. I envy my creative friends who are taken up by and lost in a genuine vocation, which speaks to their soul. I’ll not really give it a second thought when I stop doing it. If someone paid me to publish stuff like this instead, or if I ever think of a book to write rather than a series of rambles to self-publish? Well, I’ll do that, I guess. Time yet for more stuff to happen, of course.

Now, my New Year’s Resolution to write 12 of these starts to look a bit unlikely to be completed, doesn’t it? This is number 4. Still – all writing is progress, and if it brings enjoyment, great. I suspect, as I am about to go into hospital for an operation and spend two weeks recovering, that I will attempt to at least write a couple more before we drift into 2022.

Next time, I shall offer up some thoughts on, well… let’s see. Might be sport, might be politics, might be cooking… might be something else. Assuming I am spared an early demise under general anaesthetic, it won’t be too far away – I promise you that.

Another common subject to look at, this month. Drinking alcohol is pastime for many of us, and here we look at what the British in particular consider to be a great ‘social lubricant’ that has bubbled, sloshed and gurgled through our society for hundreds, indeed thousands, of years.

I’m going to add an author’s note, right at the beginning. I’ve already pointed out the personal relationship and history I have with Moving House, and Running. I have an even closer one, with booze, and it’s going to give us something to giggle at here and there over the coming pages. However, I will also be describing some events where, after a long career, I realised that drinking was a hobby I had to give up. That, in turn, will lead to an exposition of some thoughts that I had around the time, and have had since I went dry. Please don’t think I am moralising, hectoring, or suggesting that I Am Right, in any way at all. The tone of this piece is designed to be received as it was in the last two pieces. Pick a common subject, discuss it a bit, and tell some stories from the perspective of one’s own life. Laugh, cry, or close the window and wait for next month – that’s your pleasure.

So, as I opened the page to start writing this, I checked. It’s been 1,176 days since I last bought, and drank, an alcoholic drink. Broadly speaking, that’s my definition of ‘me drinking’, but we will come to that, later, perhaps.

I changed my policy on drinking on the 17^th February 2018. I came to, after about six hours’ sleep, in a hotel room in Muscat, Oman. My wife and I had gone there on a short holiday to celebrate her 40^th birthday.  I was ragingly thirsty, was pounded by the realisation my life had to change, as I looked around the room, and saw my exhausted and despairing wife looking at me. It wasn’t long before I burst into tears, apologising for what I had just done. This was the sort of apology she had sat through on a number of occasions in the previous two and a half years. I look back on it now, with a level of shame that is, gradually, diminishing, and I realise that my tears were for myself, as well as for her. I was realising for the first time that, at the tender age of almost 44, I was going to have to remove something from my life that had been a fundamental, constant presence for the previous 25 years and more. I was also crying in sheer relief, for the path was at last clear for me to release myself from something that had me as its prisoner. In terms of the common experience of those that develop problems with drink, I had hit what often gets referred to as ‘rock bottom’. The point had arrived where either one bounced back, gradually repaired some damage, and tried to live life on different terms – or one remained on the bed of the ocean, there, all too soon, to drown.

I can only write this now, because I have embarked on doing the former, and can, I think, live in the certain knowledge that I will do so for the rest of my life. In considering that, it has just occurred to me that one of the only reasons why this was possible was that I shortly had to return to Qatar, where I was going to live for the next seven months. I had to pop to the United States, yes, but I figured that as that was for work, I would cope with that, and could then move forward. Drinking was possible in Qatar, but expensive, and not exactly a simple affair, requiring either going to special bars, where one’s ID went on record, or getting a permission slip from work to be able to go and buy booze from the one shop in the country that sold it. The odds of doing either without any misadventure being noted, and action taken, did not look good. And it’s not a country where you want to come to the attention of the authorities. However, drinkers always have strategies to allow drinking to happen, and it was good to think through how one might be ‘disenabled’, as it were, from taking up another drink.

In Oman, I had been very lucky. As these things go, it’s a pretty tolerant place when it comes to things like Westerners getting drunk. During the course of events, locals had simply assured themselves that I was going to be okay, tried to help me a bit, in my incoherence, and sent me on my way. So far as I can remember, at least.

What was my crime, you will want to know? I will tell you. The previous evening, we had gone out for dinner and drinks with an old friend from College, whom I had not seen for more than 20 years. After a quite boozy dinner we had gone to a club, next to our hotel. I drank beer, and became drunkenly enthusiastic. With the exception of the night before, where SWK and I had had a couple of drinks, I had not embarked on any ‘proper’ drinking for quite a while, because of where I had been living. Therefore both body and mind were totally unprepared for this bout of binge drinking. I am told that ‘shots’ arrived, which took things away from me all the more. Evidently, at some stage during the later evening, I went missing. Piecing it together, it seems I got in a taxi, imagining to myself that I had somewhere to get to, and for reasons I shall never know, nor want to know – on my own. It gets much worse (but don’t worry, we’ll lighten things up in a bit), when I tell you that I emerged from a blackout that lasted several hours, walking down a highway out of the City of Muscat. I have no memory whatsoever of what had happened between accepting a beer in the club, and arriving on staggering feet on that highway. And that’s really, really bad.

This had happened to me once before, in London, a couple of years earlier. I’d been to a lunch, near the river, and then to a pub with friends. The rot was just setting in, back then, but I thought I was having fun. Fact remains, though, that I re-entered conscious life three hours later, walking through St. Pancras station. Clueless as to what had happened to me. I had lost time.

When you wake up with a hangover as a student, not remembering having gone to bed, it’s a kind of rite of passage – or at least it was 25 or so years ago – my sense is that such things are not quite as popular as they were when I was 18-20 or so. A lot of younger people now don’t drink, for a range of reasons. One of them is no doubt their experience of seeing people in the generations above get themselves into just the sort of state as I had got myself into. When you are in your early forties, with some responsibilities, and a wife you have pledged your love and allegiance to.. well, it’s just not funny anymore, and consequences are so damaging as to affect the whole of the rest of your life.

Another stroke of luck came in the form of a new friend my wife made that might – a local man, a non-drinker, who came to her aid in dealing with the situation, my frantic family back home, and the potential for the police taking action when I was finally found. Fortunately for them, but mostly fortunately for me, I had emerged from the disastrous fog of that night within striking distance of a petrol station, where two lads were out driving during the night. I threw myself upon their mercy – they drove me back to the hotel and gave me some crisps along the way (quite nice crisps – thanks boys). I got to the hotel – I apologised (obviously still drunk, but able to think and talk clearly again, despite that) to everyone, including our new friend. The search was called off and we went to bed. He proved a friendly companion for the rest of our trip, and he provided to me the first example, immediately after that terrible event, of someone near to my age who was quite happily enjoying life without alcohol. It was something that I needed to see, and a state of peace to which I immediately aspired, and indeed was desperate to achieve.

And as I am typing this, more than three years later, I realise how important that state of calm and peace is to me. It didn’t enter my head to drink yesterday – it won’t today and it won’t tomorrow. I have not seriously considered the value of taking on a proper drink in at least two years. And it’s not just the inherent risk of doing so (or being caught doing so by those that love me and ought to be able to rely on me) – maybe not an incident the first time I did it – maybe not the second, but ultimately there would be something utterly catastrophic waiting in the wings. No, it’s just because I no longer want to. At all. I have a clear head, I feel (mostly) well, mentally and physically, and most of the unwanted chaos of my life has melted away- although by its nature, nothing is perfect. And everything – everything, is still fun. Things that are fall-down funny are still fall-down funny. The company of other people is still enjoyable (if a bit limited at the moment), and I have no problem at all watching other people drink. The tiniest caveat to that is that on the rare occasion I am in the company of a suite of other people who are really going for it, I will probably go home a bit earlier than once would have been the case. But that’s okay – none of us are missing out, and we are all getting what we want out of life.

Like lots of us, on entering adult life, I have keenly associated fun, celebrations, sex, holidays and all sorts of other things with drink and drinking. It’s just how life brings most of us up, isn’t it? And to a certain degree, that’s fine. It’s alright to overdo it now and again, and to enjoy light-hearted misadventure, as we are often wont to do. It’s alright to be, on balance, a heavier drinker, provided you do some things to counteract the worst effects of that.

The real problem comes when our relationship with drink becomes passive. When our capacity to control ourselves in the face of drink, and to remain clear about the bigger picture, goes away. Many people characterise this as the ‘off switch’, and I do too, when it comes to me. At some point, during 2016, that off switch that, in truth, was always something I had a mixed mastery of, became inaccessible to me. That set me on the inexorable path to that night in Oman. I would probably press the argument that being forced out of my job (voluntarily in the end) in the previous year was a contributing factor to that change. The prevailing biology and psychology is all mine, of course, but there was also a trigger, in the form of at times almost intolerable responsibility and stress. When one goes from a good, big job, to not knowing what to do with oneself, then any problems with one’s lifestyle likely find their way closer to the surface.

Over a period of 18 months or, so I became progressively unreliable when drink entered the day. I behaved with, at times, quite crashing irresponsibility, about which I now shudder with embarrassment and shame. And towards the end of that time, when the modesty of the Middle Eastern life came in to at least start to save me from this, I remember quite clearly sitting, drunk, on my own, crying about how much I hated drinking. Lifting the glass, drinking the contents, and hating what I was doing. Not hating myself, but hating it. Do we do other things in life where we actively hate what we are doing? I’m not sure. But boozing had come to be a hateful chore. Which was ridiculous.

I’m not stupid – and I wasn’t then, either. I could see this for what it was, when in a clear frame of mind. I did try to solve it. I did go dry for as much as a month, a couple of times, through sheer force of willpower, but in the end I cracked because I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was missing out, and that my choices had been reduced. My life, according the drunk bit of me, was being ‘limited’, and that was not fair, somehow. Not fun enough, somehow? Actually, of course, my life and the choices I had was being limited by the drive to pick up a drink. Other things to enjoy were vanishing in their number, and barely visible on the horizon. No wonder I was so miserable – particularly when I cast that existence against the one I have now. To give you a live example? So far today, I have got up at 8.00am on a Saturday, made a nice breakfast for me and SWK, dealt with the laundry, started making a fragrant candle (yes, I know, I have a new lockdown hobby – yes, it’s all a bit hippie-fied, and no, I don’t care), put together a curry sauce for my tea later, played with the dog, planned a run for this afternoon and read some of my book. I am typing this, and watching some snooker. I am having a productive day off and I am happy. If I had spent last night getting shitfaced – well, I might be awake, but I would be constricted into a tiny sad ball of pity and hate. The hell with that.

Perhaps I can deal with a few side issues and common things around boozing, then? Give some wider application to my own experience.

People will tell you that, even though they plainly drink enough to float a barge, it’s okay because they don’t get up and begin the day with a drink. A tourniquet around the arm to steady it from shaking, and a big slug of vodka – that kind of thing? Desperation stakes. The sort of boozy mess that ‘other people’ find themselves in? I was pretty sympathetic to that point of view for a while. But now, of course, I realise it’s complete hokum. Whether or not you commence drinking at 6.00am or 6.00pm, it’s pretty much immaterial if you can’t then stop again. If you start in the morning, then you won’t be able to engage in the day – well, not properly – I’m not sure I care for the notion of functional alcoholism – it always sounds like bullshit heroism, to me. Sympathise with the poor folks who have a life like that – of course I do, but if that’s you, then you need help stopping that. Conversely, if you start drinking at night, and don’t stop, you’re going to go to bed or just plain pass out, pissed. You will sleep pissed and wake up pissed. You’ll travel to work pissed. You’ll attend meetings pissed – teach pissed – operate on people pissed. By no objective standard is this a good thing. However – if you can get to 6.00pm, make your dinner and drink a glass or two of wine, then a glass or two of water and go to bed? Well, good for you. Why not? Sounds good to me, and if I thought I could do that (my wife does that) then that’s what I would do. But hey ho. I can’t and I don’t – crucially I no longer envy anyone who can.

The negative voice when it comes to addressing our drinking also says that without alcohol, fun stuff will not be fun anymore. Do the people that follow this particular credo have no memory of things perhaps being fun and funny before they reached the age when drink became available to them? Have they absolutely no recall of killing themselves laughing at something as a kid? There will be such people, I guess, and again one feels very sad for them. Some of them may have become alcoholic, which is even worse. But, if you are a person who is no longer in a comfortable place with drinking, then this is a bit of perceived wisdom you might seek to challenge. You are still you, if you don’t have any alcohol in your body. Your capacities are undimmed. You have the same amount of charisma and joie de vivre you had when you had a good night out that time and drank six pints. Don’t doubt yourself, in your natural state. If adding booze to your natural state doesn’t lead you to my sort of ‘Muscat Moment’, then crack on as you will. But, to my mind, one should never consider that adding alcohol means you are improving yourself. You aren’t. Even on a cloudy day, the skies that lie behind the clouds are still blue – they are just, for the moment, invisible to you. But they are there. In much the same way, our existence in its raw state can always be enjoyable. Well – I reckon that’s the case.

In talking to people about drinking, and reading about drinking, one hears a lot about the capacity of a community to help people with being abstinent. Evidently, in lot of cases, it does do that. AA. 12 Steps. All that stuff. For many recovering drunks, it’s a centrepiece to their life and very much to be applauded for that. If it did not exist, you would have to invent it, as people need a community to help themselves with their problems – whatever their problems might be.

I went a few times and it wasn’t for me – but once again, that’s just me. I have been wondering why it didn’t work for me, though. I think I have worked it out, and I’m happy to say that it’s not because of that common criticism: “it’s all a bit Goddy”. That’s crap, and it’s a critique borne of the part of the mind that just doesn’t want to give up drinking (yet). It has a structure. It has commonly repeated words and phrases that are designed to help, motivate and inspire to a belief that alcohol addiction can be overcome. But it doesn’t take much to divorce that from the existence of God, and it’s not set up to make you seek out a relationship with God. I’m an Agnostic. I was an Agnostic before I became a problem drinker – I was an Agnostic when I attended AA meetings. I was still an Agnostic when I gave up drinking – and I am currently writing this from a standpoint of Agnosticism. Nothing has changed.

Get a sponsor – make the 12 Steps your life’s work if you need to. That’s all fine. If it works, then it works.

But I didn’t like it because of the concept of people sharing without a right of reply. I like a group conversation. I like to challenge and be challenged. I believe in the power of collective reasoning and collective progress. I like to listen, but I like to respond, and be responded to. My experience showed I don’t like just hearing monologues. Logic, though, tells me that sharing is about fairness. Everyone can say what they want, if they want to. To invite debate is to invite hostility, and negativity, and that can negate progress gained. Interesting. I don’t go to AA meetings, because I rely on discussion. And this is my Blog and this is my experience.

What I don’t do, is drink anymore. And the reason I am able not to is all to do with the passage of time. At various points during my first year off the sauce, I might well have cracked. I had a lot of internal struggle and debate. I had a lot of desire to press the ‘fuck it’ button because I just wanted to. But I didn’t. Because I always asked myself what tomorrow was going to feel like, if I had one drink, that turned into ten, and I found myself in bits in front of those I love more than anything. How indescribably awful would that be? It would be awful, and it would be indescribable. I also told myself that I should just “give it one more day”. If I wanted to drink tomorrow, I would have the discussion again then. But I wasn’t going to act on the urge on that particular day. The more time one gives oneself, the more time passes and the more a newly ordered life beds in.

I think it’s also alright to feel like shit about it all. Not to wallow in it, but if you try to change a massive part of your life, then doing so is going to be frustrating. Some days are going to be crap, and on some occasions, despite all of the progress made, people are going to fail. But if they do (and I certainly did, before the ‘click’ moment – loads of times) then the next thing to do is to build up a sense of pride about not drinking the next day. Get up. Glass of water. Cup of coffee. Go for a walk. Answer an e-mail or two. Make progress, forgive self and enjoy what you achieve next. If you make a bad meal, you don’t respond the next day by just giving up eating, do you?

Forgiving yourself is hard and, in truth, it’s the bit I still struggle with. Most of the time I can content myself with being the best bloke I can be. Accepting, friendly, humorous and enquiring. I love my wife – I love my friends – I love my family and I love my dogs. I love my life. But every so often I fall into a terrible funk about how, eventually, drinking became a burden rather than a laugh, and I was an appalling version of myself. I can apologise for it, but I cannot stop it being an article of historical fact. I was a twat that time. I did embarrass myself, or you, or us, that time. It all happened, and that is regrettable. BUT all I can do now is focus on what is happening today and will happen tomorrow and the next day. If I make mistakes in the future, I will correct them and I will apologise if I hurt anyone. Chances are, being sober, I will make fewer screw ups and I will be a better friend, husband, son, brother and slave to the canines. Which is nice.

Now, this has been confessional, and less overtly gag-a-minute than some of my other stuff, but I have been wanting to write it for a while and now it’s out of my system I will no doubt offer up lighter essays and reminiscences. Indeed, I promise to do so. As I said at the beginning, I come not to judge you or anyone else, and hope I have not come across as doing so. I didn’t start drinking as a teenager with the intention of becoming a drunk. That I did was unfortunate, but it has proved something that has, so far, been reversible, for which I am thankful on a daily basis. All I would ever do is offer the advice for people to look after themselves. To pause for a moment, now and again to check their motivation in making the choices they make. Chances are that you are doing things is good rather than bad faith. But if you aren’t, you can change that. Or someone might be able to show you how to.

For balance, five fun and amusing things about my drinking life:

1. I took up booze-making not long after I met SWK, and, after a bit of a pause, I am back doing it again. Sure, I’ll taste test things; just half a mouthful  with a bit of water, but it’s something I am doing for the pleasure of others. It’s a creative outlet I am working on getting better at. Just like this is. My apple tree is covered in blossom, and this Autumn you’ll find me making cider, but drinking a mug of tea. And that makes me every happy.

• I still like the taste of beer. Rather than being a problem, these days that represents an opportunity. The range and the quality of no-alcohol or 0.5% alcohol beer out there is huge, and a lot of it is delicious, refreshing, and cause for celebration without recrimination.

• I still have a load of stories from the days when I finished up sloshed and did no harm. And they still make me laugh, because I always have had and always will have a sense of humour. I am not one of life’s po-faced people and I am not going to become one. I have recounted some of those stories here, and haven’t finished yet. Life is fun.

• Two of my very best friends in the whole world don’t drink. I love them like Brothers. They are funny, loving people who I have shared some singularly wonderful times wit, and will again, soon.

• If I knew I had ten minutes to live, I would probably share a glass of wine with my wife. It would be a glass of Chateau Musar red wine, made in Lebanon, which remains the greatest alcoholic drink I have ever tasted. Under those very unlikely circumstances, I don’t see the harm, and it might take the edge off dying. If you drink, and you like red wine, make sure you have some, one day, before you die. Trust me on this. One glass, can’t hurt.

Pressing on with the New Year’s Resolutions, then, with this latest writing project being one of them. I have also been baking loaves of bread (one awful, one excellent, and one a bit weird and twisted (which I had toasted this morning – it tasted alright, but you wouldn’t take it home to Mother)), plus giving a bit to charity, and I will soon begin a growing fruit and veg project in the grounds with SWK.

A regular feature of the ‘what I should probably try to do this year’ list, is running, or, perhaps more accurately, exercising for a certain number of miles on foot, recorded assiduously on RunKeeper on my ‘phone, since I first started on 13^th February 2013. We have just passed eight years into this unexpected phase of my life, and the grand total is now 4,311 miles (as I type). Therefore, I am turning out about 530 or so miles per year, on average. This is not much, compared to what some people do, but I lack the dedication, time, or interest to lope along for 16 miles on a Sunday morning, when frankly 3, 4 or 5 miles suits me quite nicely, backed-up by marching along with one or both dogs as well. The running part is all on the treadmill in the garage, at the moment, because, in truth, I generally feel pretty self-conscious when out and about exercising. I can walk a dog with a certain amount of middle-aged dignity – no problems there. Nevertheless, to my shame, I always feel like I look a complete sight when running outdoors, and somehow a bit deficient, in comparison with others who always look smooth, composed, lean and neat. However, I plan to break through this self-imposed wall, later in the year, now that we have some nice countryside available, and a less abusive public to contend with, compared to where we used to live.

All of this is, being an activity undertaken for only 8 of the last 47 years, is really quite new, still. And it didn’t always used to be this way..

My favourite book is Earthly Powers, by the late, great, Anthony Burgess; an old-School polymath, whose career went far too overlooked. If you should ever feel there is a 678-page hole in your life, that you would like to fill with a parodical saga and memoir that deals with a writer’s battle with the Church, his art and his homosexuality, set against a backdrop of the major events of the first 80 years of the 20^th Century – then this one’s for you. Beware, though, it’s a chewy bugger, as novels go. I adore it, but have only managed to read it all the way through on three occasions in the 25 years since I first became aware of it.

It begins with an extraordinarily provocative sentence:

“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”

The hero of the tale, which starts near the end, is one Kenneth Marchal Toomey. He is living in Malta, with his thoroughly unpleasant ‘catamite’, in the form of Geoffrey Enright – a man in his late 30’s, who bullies his impotent lover, Toomey, both physically and verbally, mostly out of jealousy for the older man’s talents and connections. He (Enright) is a drunken, cowardly and insidious liability, and, as Toomey puts it “fast running to fat – although Geoffrey never ran.”

That was the expression that came to me this morning when I decided to start working on this piece. I never ran. Ever. In addition, I have always struggled a bit with my weight. Somewhat. However, this isn’t about to become a misery memoir chapter entitled ‘On Being Given to Portliness’ – let’s take it as read that there have been periods of my life, so far, when I have inclined more to the spherical, and have never been pleased about it. At the moment, on the cusp of my late forties, I am somewhere between circular and oblong, and trying to move towards the latter.

Why? Lack of exercise, too much booze, and an irregular diet. Nothing unusual. I don’t have some malfunctioning gland at which I can point an accusatory finger. The state of me is the state of a lot of people, physically speaking. We are bombarded, now, by tales of the obesity epidemic. Folk are characterised as sat at home, getting outside of sandwiches composed of salt, sugar and fat, watching box-sets, and waiting for Dominos to open their doors for an evening delivery. Of course, there will be more than a single grain of truth in that. Enough evidence shows us that people are just getting bigger – and particularly in the ‘First World’. However, I am given to wonder about the efforts people make to counteract their worst and most slothful instincts. The lockdown in its various forms has seen quite a lot of focus given to our daily quotient of exercise – partly as an expression of their freedom to leave their home, and to avoid going mad and slaughtering their loved ones. I see a lot of people out and about jogging. Many others begin their day puffing along to that Wicks chap, in a superannuated PE class, and if adverts are anything to go by, the purchase of a Peloton bike and subscription will soon be mandatory for anyone with a BMI of over 25.

Just bung a question into Google, and see what comes back. The ukactive survey indicates that the ‘average’ person questioned does 90 minutes of moderate physical activity every week, but that more than 25% of us in the UK do less than 30. Other sources indicate that as many as 37% of us play no sport and do no exercise. Crikey – that’s a lot of people, right?

I do wonder a bit about this, though. Surely you don’t have to be flying down the wing and scoring tries every Saturday, do you? Lots of things must count that don’t get counted. Exercise is not always something we do for fun – we often do it by dint of our work. Carrying bricks on a building site must, to give lazy and obvious example, set up quite a calorific deficit. Even walking from the train station to the office knocks off some of the edges. We might, as a nation, be one of the slower coaches of the world, but we’re not all waddling around like this bloke:

So, boringly, it’s clearly a balance. If you are an enthusiast for the good works of the pie industry, then it’s true, as it has always been true, that you need to move around a bit more if you don’t want to attract your own satellites. I’m not trying to educate anyone here, by the way. Whilst I did once pull off a reasonably spectacular personal feat of downsizing (which I will talk about later), I am just like everyone else, and I need a periodic kick up the arse that is either administered by the sensible bit of my brain, or through a tearful engagement with the button of my waistband. However, perhaps it is helpful to state the obvious, now and again? Don’t know.

Why, then, could I never see this?

I have reached some conclusions, but they are only my conclusions, rather than general ones:

I have asthma.

It was diagnosed for the first time when I was about seven or eight, I think. I had an old school, red and white, Allen and Hanburys Intal Inhaler, and was just sort of conscious of it forever more.  I still am, but these days treatments are so much more effective that it occupies only the tiniest little office in the back of my mind. I can do some running and not need it. For years and years and years, however, I would worry about where my device was, and, faced with doing something strenuous would imagine I was going to have an asthma ‘attack’ and be rendered embarrassed, immobile, and, just possibly, dead.

I hated exercise at School.

I mean, I hated School full-stop, really, as I didn’t like the School I went to, once I was 11. It was an all-boys Grammar School, and competitive, aggressive and nasty. Weakness, in physical and mental form, was met with derision and bullying. Understanding of differences between us were thin on the ground. Differentiation was just a difficult word to spell.  In the colder months, I would labour through games of hockey and rugby and be breathless and unhappy. The only counterweight to any of this came in the Summer months, when we played cricket. It was more my kind of pace, and I was, by any estimate, a good fast medium swing bowler. I took loads of wickets, and gained some popularity for it. Being quite blockish, I harnessed some of that beef and hit a few sixes. I carried on playing as an undergraduate, and even on into my mid-twenties, but then gave up. I regret that, now. All of the positives gained were spoiled, though, by the requirement to occasionally run all the way around the School fields on colder and wetter days. I would invariably finish last or nearly last, and even being in that group of slow performers didn’t have any camaraderie to it. We were just slow, wheezy, fat and miserable, and would get ‘teased’ (beaten up) for being so. Lovely. I don’t miss being a teenager.

I took up smoking.

And for this, I will always be an idiot. I gave up about eight years ago, and won’ t be going back for a moment. However, from the first moment the teenage me wilfully picked a cigarette up (and loved it first time) to the last one I ground out in an ashtray in Oslo? Stupid, stupid stupid. Aside from the cost, the stink, and the sheer foolishness of it, of course it served for more than two decades to interact with my asthma and made me incapable of exercising properly, even if I wanted to. I smoked because I sort of wanted to, I guess. I thought it was adding something. I was deluded by addiction, and insulted my own intelligence. Still, that’s long over now.

I thought I knew best.

In many ways, actually, this was probably the worst contributory factor. I sat there, with my glass of beer and my fag, watching and studying sport, and playing cricket now and again. I would openly scoff when friends informed me that exercise was the way to be less fat, and more cheerful and energetic. I just wasn’t having it, I’m afraid. Like a lot of people, I assumed that life had a magic bullet that I was just waiting to find. The reality of the situation is, of course, that it’s a case of building yourself and your life from a million little pebbles. Oh well – I suppose with age comes at least a bit of wisdom, although I suspect I am behind the curve on that front, too. I really do regret not having made greater use of my body when it was earlier still earlier in its initial guarantee period. I did do some useful stuff in my twenties, like sorting out a career I could handle, and some affordable lodgings (as per my other recent post). However, I look back now and again and think I might have been more effective had I only just knocked myself into shape whilst I was still on the youthful side of the register. Life carries with it that nagging worry that one too many curries, cigs and pints having gone down, which then, one day, will come back to bite me. I have the recurring daydream (no, not daydream, more of a waking nightmare) of cheerily retiring one day, and checking out courtesy of a massive heart attack the next day, as payment for all past sins.

Still hopefully not, eh?

For all that evidence of genetic illness, stubbornness, stupidity and bad habits ingrained, I did, at last, have a Road to Damascus moment, in the Summer of 2012. It was to lead to me gaining an excellent bill of health when I had my first post-40 MOT, about 18 months later. A lot of good habits have stuck, and one very important one, that I will deal with another time, has come back to me. Running, and the route to running, has remained a constant, in a lot of different ways.

So in early July 2012, waking with a headache after Andy Murray had lost the Wimbledon final, I poured away (in disgust) all the booze in the house, drank only water, tea and coffee for a year, ate only low carb food, and six months into that year took up exercise and dropped the fags. I lost a grand total of 101lb in that period, and by the end of it was in the shape of my life. Everything, and I mean everything, turned around for me in that period of my life. The lifestyle thing and the exercise bit of it in particular, was entirely behind this.

By March 2013, I was waking up fresh as a daisy at 6.00am on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and walking five miles before so much as the thought of a coffee or some breakfast. I had reasoned that extra exertion would add to the reduction of the flesh. I would arrive home, make eggs and bacon, smoke a cigarette or two (dear, sweet, foolish younger me) and drink my coffee, safe in the knowledge I had already taken 650-odd calories out of the day. I already felt amazing, and I hadn’t even started running, yet. My feet hurt, because, me being me, I was doing all of this in a Winter coat and smart shoes. Over time, I graduated to gardening trainers, then cheap new trainers, and eventually to running shoes. I bought a pair of shell-suit tracksuit bottoms for £3 and a t-shirt for £2, washed them constantly and wore them out completely. Every few weeks I jettisoned older bits of my wardrobe to the charity shops, and bought cheap, temporary replacements as I gradually ‘disappeared’ into a narrower and narrower shadow of my former self.

As I look back on it, 4,000-odd miles later, I realise there was a certain inevitability to the change of pace that occurred. I was wearing fewer clothes, as the weather warmed. As I always do, when I am on my own (it’s less safe with a dog), I was listen to enervating and energising music. I was walking so quickly I was almost running. Almost. There lingered in my mind those words, however: “Geoffrey never ran”. I wasn’t going to. I couldn’t, could I? I had said so on Facebook. I would surely expire and have to be revived at the roadside if I did. The past loomed over me, and shook its head, slowly.

But then, one chill dawn in April 2013, with no one to see me but the birds and the squirrels, I jogged 50 yards. Then I walked 200 yards. Then I jogged another 70. And so on and so on it went. My lungs forgot to burn, my heart ticked merrily. My arse and my legs and my back all expressed a bit of surprise, but did not complain or threaten any sort of strike. I could sort of do it, a bit. I coined the term ‘ralking’, as a concatenation or compounding (or something like that – bear with me, I’m having a joyful reverie here), of running and walking. It just improved, and improved, and so did I. I crested hills, music bursting in my ears, and then WHOOSH – as I ran down them.

After a while, I was almost betting with myself. Could I, or would I, run to the next bus stop, or parked car? Could I continue to run until I heard the next ‘five minute’ update on RunKeeper? Could I run through two such announcements? It was utterly, insanely infectious and alien and wonderful. On some mornings, and this does me little credit, but I’m not sure I care too much, I would espy unthreatening-looking early risers on the horizon, and set about catching and overtaking them. Yes, unwitting souls were pacemaking for me, and racing me. I was, perhaps, a little unhinged for a while there, but really only in a good way.

In the late Spring and early Summer, I ran ‘round Statue Park in Oslo, and up the side (not quite literally) of the Aqueduto das Águas Livres in Lisbon. It was 85 degrees, I was sweating cobs, and it was bloody awesome.

Periods of running were knitting together, and I was running more than walking. I can still picture the moment when I realised I had run a whole mile, non-stop, and easily. I had never, ever, done that before in my life.

I went on and ran 2, 3, 4 and then 5 miles consecutively. I ran 10k in 80, 70, 60, and finally 55 minutes. I did a ParkRun. Me! I ran two or three 5k charity events, with other people, and was not (to my face at least) laughed at. I raised money – I talked to other people about running and read articles about it.

Sidebar: God love me, I still can’t make myself love running with other people. When properly fit, at least back then, I could run 8-9 minute miles, which is perfectly respectable. I know that logically – and I was honestly doing it with my clothes on – I wasn’t Goose-stepping with toilet roll trailing from the crack of my bum, or anything – but for the life of me I can’t ‘fit’ into that mode. It doesn’t matter, of course – not a bit – and it would be impossible to shed all of life’s insecurities. If it suits you, then it suits you. Who knows, I might try it again one day. I counsel myself that I am outgoing in a range of other ways, and that’s fine.

The new me went internet dating. A girl became a girlfriend, for a while a mistress (that was kind of cool, as I was still legally married to Sarah The First), then a live-in-lover, then a fiancée and now the wife that she still is, thank goodness. She’s in the other room just now, as I grin and type, oblivious to all this re-telling.

On and on I ran. Fit as I wanted to be. Life in good balance, with a decent amount of weight staying off.

Then work went wrong. It was best for me to leave my job. We were okay for money, and within 18 months I was Cox Of Arabia (as has been detailed on here before) and marching up and down the Corniche in the blazing Sun, and hammering away nightly in the gym, sprinting my way back towards 10 minute miles.

But, but. Those 18 months cost me so much of what I had gained, I’m afraid. I wanted to do everything I had been doing, but I had been cast into an existence without direction or base. No rhythm to the days or the weeks or the months. Insufficient reasons to enjoy anything. Too many reasons to go still, and to eat, drink and be unhappy. Sad faces all ‘round, for quite a long time, and even with the various bits of rebuilding that have followed, and adventures that went with them, there remains much to do, to regain that old ground.

However, I somehow know that I will. One is always unsure about things, particularly right now, but this is one that’s not going away. It’s built in, and it’s free at the point of use.

It is still a good feeling, even if just hobbling along slower than I used to. The heartbeat still slows afterwards, the endorphins flood into the gap, and the bad mood lightens – none of this stuff leaves you – you cannot use it up. It’s a case of re-learning those earlier lessons about patience, and Rome not being built in a day. Every forward step not being a backward one. Expressing to yourself the same positive messages as to the benefits of running (or any exercise, really) that you would to other people, in seeking to encourage them forward, and to their own heights, and goals. One’s expected lifespan is quite long. One day, with age, I guess walking may take over, as bones go more brittle and there is no floodtide of energy to draw upon any more, but I think what I can show is that it is never too late to make a change. I was THIRTY-NINE. Still young, but not all that young.

We don’t lose anything by changing, and indeed we only stand to gain by doing so. And you can revisit lessons that life teaches you, and learn the language of them all afresh. Find new things in them. Pull on trainers and soak up every fresh yard, and every swing of the leg. Every beautiful chord on your headphones, as you duck under another minute off your old time. There is something out there for all of us – even me, it turned out.

So yes, Geoffrey never ran. But I do. And I am off to do some more of it now.

Next essay/think piece/reminiscence will need a little bit more thought, but it was always one I promised myself I would write about, one day, and so now I will. Next time? A journey towards, through, and beyond, drinking alcohol. Laughter, tears and a lot of love.

Stay safe – back next month.

A little preamble

I have committed myself to recommence rambling. For now, I shall leave the situation hanging a little longer in the wilds of South America (as I look back on all I have produced, I see that there are a number of untied threads to attend to… one day). I won’t forget – honest. I know I did not quite get as far as my brush with cannibalism, in Montevideo, but I will. Promise.

However, for now, I have decided to write some light-hearted essays on significant things in life. Well, that is, significant events in my life which have been the cause for jollity, a furrowed brow, a little tragedy, and so on and so forth. The things that stand up to a bit of retelling for the amusement, interest and disgust of others. These things aren’t entirely ubiquitous, of course, as nothing is, but hopefully some elements will resonate with the experiences of the readership (if anyone is still hanging on for this Blog – I may, by now, be screaming into the void, but at least writing it keeps my mind active, as Covid keeps me indoors).

So – this moving house business, then? It happens a lot, and is often cited as one of the worst events of adult life – right up there with divorce. Although, of course, unless one is very, very unfortunate one probably moves house more times than one is divorced. Since I turned 18, and reached Man’s Estate (a relevant term, I suppose), I have, by my calculation, moved home on 11 occasions. At present rate, then, about once every 2.6 years. That will sound a lot, I think, but from 18-22 I was an undergraduate student, so it was an annual job, and this affects the average a bit. As a buyer, I have bought and moved into six homes, in a period of 20 years. That still feels like a lot; but some of the moves have been dictated by my job, resultant income, or the opportunity to sell at a good price and move to a place that is a) better/nice and b) cheaper, in relative terms. For completeness – I have only been divorced once thus far, and it was shamefully easy, and not as eye-wateringly an expensive business as is the case with more acrimonious uncouplings. I don’t really deal much in acrimony. If I pass out of this life never having ‘lawyered up’ it will only be a good thing (with every apology to all Lawyers – I hear only good things about you).

How I do I compare, then? In addition, what is everyone else up to? Are we all glued to Zoopla, Rightmove and all other sources of property information and temptation? Easy answer – yes. Once we get on the housing ladder, it becomes an idle piece of speculation to continually check on prices and what housing stock is available and, undoubtedly, this prompts sales and purchases. Also, factor-in the gruesome spectre of death, and its knock-on effects. And the dream we are sold (at least in the UK – in many other locations a life of renting is much more then norm) of home ownership and the long march to riches means an inevitable rush to first-time-buying at the first available opportunity.

Even just the most cursory Google, though, reveals a Zoopla survey from three years ago that leads to the conclusion that ‘we’ move once every 23 years. And the figure has in fact grown, substantially, over the last three decades – as much as six times, to my knock-me-down-with-a-feather surprise.

How? Maybe everyone starts out the same, but then finds, for one reason or another the place where they want to be, and just lives there? Do we get too set in our ways? Older, tired and fearful of the process, cost and the ramifications of a house move? My Mum and Dad have lived in the same house for 44 years, this year, and have only moved (as a financial transaction) three times since 1968. So, they are sitting on a 17.6(ish) average, which, if they are spared a few more years, will get up close to that figure of 23. We (SWK and I) moved last year (I’ll get to that, later) and even if I live to be 100 (signs are pointing to unlikely), my own average would only get to just a bit over 12.

Now, alright.. I know a sample size of me, my wife and my parents is not a lot to go on, but it does raise a few questions. How can a survey tell us that our periods of occupation are stretching out, without transactions slowing down, particularly? After all – there were 5.34 million sales in 2019, just before we all had to head for home and stay inside. Easy answer, of course – in the 2011 Census, 1,570,228 people in England and Wales said they had a second address in England and Wales outside the local authority of their primary residence. Put simply, a lot of the UK housing market is about speculation, rather than accommodation. Another little bit of Googling shows us that as much as a TRILLION POUNDS of property is tied-up in homes owned in multiples. Landlords. Overseas buyers (or Oligarch Drug Barons, depending on the papers you read). People speculating on more property, instead of modern pensions, which have become so much more expensive. Investing in bricks and mortar remains the best-hedged bet out there, and it is tremendously popular.

Personally speaking, I couldn’t be doing with a second home. I’d like the money instead, so I didn’t have to work, and could spend my time procrastinating over unwritten Blog articles. It just feels like too much responsibility. Too much to worry about. Too many apps on your phone, showing the view from doorbell-mounted cameras, allowing you to shoo away ne’er-do-wells from your ‘other place’ in Taunton. Nah, not for me, but we do know a lot of people do it, and seemingly without turning a hair. Ever watched Homes Under The Hammer, and dropped your cup of coffee when some children tell Dion Dublin that they have a ‘portfolio of 50 properties’? Wow. Transported to such an Empire to preside over, I would, quite literally, never sleep again.

There is a very common cycle. It’s not one that is followed by everyone, far from it (more than a third of us do not own the home we live in). BUT, very generally, we live in a family home, we leave a family home and rent shared property from what I am going to call The Specularti (all 1.57 million of them), and then, at some point or another, we find a way to buy, and we enter those statistics I have glossed over so lazily, above.

Now, what this does is generate the daily process and the need for moving house. This, as we shall see, comes in many and varied forms, and is what my reminiscences will centre on. It does not necessarily mean Solicitors, Estate Agents and long dark nights of the soul. No, people move overnight, and in a very informal way. People move into cash-paid accommodation, off the books. I once knew a man who moved from York to Sheffield in a Robin Reliant, with the single front wheel falling off at the conclusion of the final trip between homes. A typical early-life move will be one we make in our 20’s from one rental situation to another. When I was that age, my friends seemed to mover every other week, and on a number of occasions I was roped in. Why? Because I owned a Skoda Favorit, and had, at that stage, an on-off relationship with working life.

One of those friends – a chap I shall call James, because that is his name, needed a hand moving out of a flat above a Post Office. These being my younger and more dissolute days, I had spent some rather lively evenings in that flat.. and some rather ‘laid back’ ones, too. The exit route was via some rather steep stairs, down which I had fallen, a few weeks earlier, in a state of ‘advanced relaxation’. That fall left me with two simultaneously sprained ankles, and for a few days, I was parading ‘round like Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator.

On this occasion, for reasons that remain unclear to me, I reached for the door-knocker chez James, dressed in a pair of cream-coloured trousers (as part of my ensemble). This sartorial decision was to pay me off quite badly, and only a few minutes later. James is a handful of years older than me and so, at around the 30 mark, and moving in with a grown-up woman (still Mrs James, all these later, by the way), he could lay claim to one or two possessions beyond the standard clothes/CDs which most of us could lay hands on. One of these was an elderly, and quite heavy, fridge. He assured me that he had spent some considerable time defrosting the white (more yellow-y, in truth) goods, and that we were all set to push off to Love Nest #1 (I assisted the couple with two more moves, in the foothills of their life together – I imagine others step in, now we are all getting on a bit).

When moving large things down stairs, I tend to ask to go first. I have no idea why this is the case, and I suspect there is no definitive logic I can cite to support it being the safest end of the operation, any more than being the back end of this particular pantomime cow would be. But, there we are – I was driving, and I got my wish. And, for the first half of the descent, matters were going swimmingly. Until there came a little gurgle from within the workings of our burden, and a slick of rusty meltwater issued forth across my hands. My grip was lost. I dropped my end, and tumbled backwards to the bottom of the stairs. Again. Then, in much the same way an anvil hits Wily Coyote on the head, some time after he has already fallen to the bottom of a cliff, the fridge moved into top gear (over a really quite short course, showing an unexpected turn of speed, for its age) and slammed into me as a I lay groaning at the foot of the stairs.

Obviously all of this hurt, quite a bit, but I was happily uninjured and able to rise back to my feet and conclude the job. The only downside was that the fridge had landed at such an angle as to disgorge the rest of its mud-coloured payload all over the front of my cream trousers. So it was, then, that I spent much of the rest of the afternoon (a sunny day, as I recall – perhaps that explains my optimistic wardrobe?) wandering around the outskirts of South Cambridge looking like a man who’d had an elaborate and doubly incontinent accident all down himself. Frankly, it was one of those days where you just crack on, brazen it out, and fire the strides straight into the bin when you get home – as I did.

I have suffered misadventure on other formative home-moving occasions, but really the property world began properly to bite rather harder a few years on from the fridge incident, when I got involved in buying and selling.

The whole thing, frankly, is bonkers. Utter lunacy. Anyone will tell you it is, but it has remained the same process for decades, presumably because no one has the energy to demystify the thing, and too many people make money out of it. Whatever the case may be, the whole thing relies on maintaining formidable levels of trust with people you have (most likely) never met, and setting out to spend a lot of money through a whole series of people who are rarely guaranteed to be doing what you expect them to be doing. It begins with a bizarre game of poker, when it comes to finding a mutually agreed price. A series of incomprehensible conversations then follow, that leads to attempts to book a whole series of practical services around a date that can stay theoretical up until pretty much 24 hours beforehand. Even in the home straight, the whole thing can collapse horridly, leaving people in dire straits and mightily out of pocket. The only positive about this, of course, is the end result, and the pleasure derived from the establishment of your ‘castle’ that means all the pain you suffered over the preceding weeks and months fades from view quite quickly.

Unless, that is, you move to a Q-style house in the small Fenland town of March, in Cambridgeshire, as I did in 2003 (in the month of March, funnily enough). You honestly believe yourself to be over the line. You hire the van, load the van, clean the old place and set off (on this occasion in convoy with my Mother, bless her) for pastures new. The call comes in. You get the keys from the agent, and turn them in the lock. Then, in short order, you discover the following things:

• A series of yellowing and rusting white goods have been left in situ
• There is no plumbing in place below the plug hole of the kitchen sink
• The wiring for your oven has been removed from the wall
• The airing cupboard in your bedroom contains upwards of 20 bags full of aggregate sand/stones
• The Central Heating system has had the timing system ripped out; and
• The property is in debt to a property management company to the tune of roughly £600

The fury that overtook me on discovering all of this then led me to getting utterly, distractedly lost when attempting to return the van, and saw the day come to an exhausted end with my Mother and me exhaustedly eating lukewarm chips and drinking a wine box in front of the telly. I was reasonably confident I would never move home again.

And yet, after a healthy pause to reflect, I did. I sold that property to a pair of giants, who’d recently retired from the armed forces. Huge people – they towered over me – seemed like a different species, frankly. This deal was struck after a series of administrative foul-ups, including a young woman withdrawing her offer at the last moment (I actually called her to plead her to see sense “Ahh dunnow, are just downt trust it mate” she said – having never met me before in her life). This means I then had to go into bat with the property developer at the other end who was working on a flat I was buying. He (we had met a few times) turned out to be the Town Shyster, and he used it as an opportunity to up his price, going into a Bank Holiday. That exchange got very heated indeed – strong opinions were shared – I seem to recall bringing his parentage into question, which was perhaps a bit strong. I was relieved and surprised when I got my money back.

So after a hiatus, the Giants came up with the goods, and we were all set. I was moving to a cottage in a small market town, half-an-hour away, next to the railway line (handy for work, characterful, stairs of a quite lively elevation). Oddly enough, this property stands next door to the cottage my Sister now owns. Funny old world, eh? Lots of happy memories of that gaff. Got married for the first time, whilst living there.

The day of the exchange/completion on the purchase was not without incident. We stood, my family and I, amongst the near-as-dammit-empty ‘old house’ when my phone range. Estate Agent. Good stuff, I thought – this will be them releasing the keys early.

No. This was them calling me, in halting tones, to tell me a lorry had reversed into the side of the property I was about to take ownership of. Happens all the time, of course. Nothing to worry about, take it in your stride, etc. In truth, I could have wept. It was one of those situations, though, where things just seem to be so irredeemably fucked that you may as well press on in the hope that things will not get radically worse. One plus was that I was buying from a competent and relaxed lady (also Forces – in terms of being trained to kill, I was the weak link in this particular chain) who informed everyone she ‘knew a bloke called Taff’ who would apparently be able to ‘sort it’. In for a penny, in for £120,000, I reasoned. We loaded up the last bits, and rolled across the Fens. My trusty Solicitor was having kittens, up in her office in Blackpool.

There’s a sidebar, by the way. The conveyancing lark. In theory, you can do it yourself (one of my friends threatened to do this, but was convinced, in the end, that it might not be terribly wise to lob up £5123056827 for something that, in the end, it turned out you didn’t legally own). It is practical to do it by correspondence, though. No real or special need to go into Solicitors firms and get charged for meetings, although I have done. Therefore, if the thing is to be played out like ‘chess by post’ used to be, then you may as well engage a competent firm in a part of the country where they can get away with charging a bit less. Saved a few quid that way. Of course, the gap in the market that this exploited has meant the arrival of ‘online conveyancing firms’ – the rough of equivalent of a legal call centre. This I have done once, and I would advise caution to anyone else considering it. Getting anyone to commit to working on your file for any period of time is near enough impossible. Convincing a firm of that sort that the practical implications of your move are of actual, real-world importance is near enough impossible, unless you really start losing it on e-mail or phone. I’ve done that too. Under Lockdown 1.0, last year. They are likely to move you from one ‘expert file handler’ to another without telling you, and to hire and fire people at a moment’s notice. I cannot imagine how miserable it is to take your law degree, and go and work on a commission basis for one of those ‘hot house’ firms. We got through it, in the end, but not without breaking a number of rules, and a couple of laws, as you will see in the concluding stanza of this property poem.

Anyway, back to 2004. We rolled up at what I was hoping would not be a pile of bricks. The reality of the situation was not as alarming as one had imagined during the journey. An exterior garden wall had taken the brunt of a reversing HGV. Not ideal, no, but by the time we got there, the soon-to-be-former owner was on site, with the aforementioned ‘Taff’. They explained what needed to be done, how much it would cost, and when it could be done. It wasn’t quite a business of spitting on our palms and shaking hands, but I did take a brown envelope stuffed with £20 notes, and agreed Taff could have them when the work was done. I called my Solicitor and told her to do the deal. With some incredulity, she agreed. I soon owned another property. And for all his eccentricities, Taff turned out to be something of a decent handyman. He converted my ‘lower meadow’ at the end of the exceptionally long garden, into a small car park.

The nail in the coffin of that particular day came with a family injury. No falling fridges this time. Rather a falling Father. My Father. He was so pleased that the working day was over that he jumped from the rear of the van whilst still holding on to the side, where the controls for the tail-lift were to be found. As a result, he shredded the palm of his right hand. That was less than ideal – not just because of the resultant pain and gouting claret, but because: a) where the bloody hell are your plasters, on the day you move house? And b) Dad was due to play the organ at my Cousin’s wedding the following day. He did, using the fingertips of the resultant claw – imagine the Bride arrived to something fairly heavy in the bass clef.

Moving to Sheffield was comparatively easy, although we did have to rent for a while, which I resented, rather, whilst we waited for a sale to be arrived at. Selling an empty place turned out to be pretty easy. Living in a rented flat? I was less keen on that, particularly when the owner tried to sell it out from under us.

Moving out of Sheffield? Bit more stressful, as it had to be done on the back of the end of my marriage to Sarah the First, and to align with getting myself up to speed with a new job in a city an hour away. Trademark amicability mean that was all okay, if a bit hurried. However, my Solicitor had retired, and the new bloke was a cautious divorcee with a red nose and a line in not trusting anyone. Wanted to tie the whole thing up in knots. He was impervious to my legendary sense of humour. Indeed, he ordered me up to Blackpool on a cold winter morning to sign some stuff. I still remember him gravely telling me that the new place ( a three-storey town house, which I want on to live in for 8.5 years – kitchen and living room on the first floor) was sited on the grounds of a former mine (Hucknall Colliery – Lower Pit). This, he told me, meant I had to read a Mines Report and sign my understanding that there were flooded open shafts within 200 metres of the foundations of my new home.

“No problem”, I quipped. “If it drops down a bit, the kitchen will open onto the back garden!”

Not a flicker from the bloke. Still, he did the business, and life went on, as life is wont to do.

All of which brings us to 2020. The year we stayed at home. Or, in our case, moved home.

This was, of course, the cause of considerable stress. However, as I said some pages back, this stress is quicker in the vanishing than it is in the creation. As I sit here now, finishing off these tales from the vaults of my life, I reflect on the fact we are very lucky to live where we are. Rural, quiet, but also with all that we need only a metaphorical stone’s throw away. Ideal for dog owners – outside space where food and flowers grow. Anterooms for my wife’s incredible store of the ephemera of her working and creative life. A study which looks out over our woodpile and on to the big countryside skies beyond. A conservatory, soon to gain a new roof, where Summer sun gathers, and seedlings will soon start their journey through the growing season. It is marvellous.

First time we looked at it, I was less than convinced, as it was hallmarked, all around us, as having been a family home for 40 years. It was soaked in the exciting history of other people, and I couldn’t see how it could change. But then, in our world, that’s not my department. Happily, I married a genius on that front – one of those people who can mentally strip a space of its current veneer, and calculate how it will be. So it was, then, that on 23^rd December 2019, a deal was struck. I had (some) faith.

Then pesky old Covid threatened to spoil it. Estate Agent locked down. Solicitor (first one) was fired by MegaCorp, and then the second was furloughed. It looked like a halt to proceedings was inevitable, but then a loophole emerged. Our House on a Mine Shaft was being purchased by first time buyers. They had just had a baby and their Evil Landlord (there we are again) was booting them out. We had compelling reasons to conclude a short chain, and after some impassioned arguing, things went ahead. The impetus behind this came when a somewhat strident lady knocked on our old front door, one day. She was the maternal Grandmother of the new born. She minced no words in telling me she felt I might hold things up, because of what she had ‘heard’ via the various malfunctioning agencies involved in the process. And here we see, if you just trust people a bit, how our antiquated process can be somewhat circumvented. I was able to pour a little of the old oil on the situation, and assure her that nothing could be further from the truth! Mrs K and I were champing at the bit. I would do all I could, etc.

And that’s what we did. Before everything shut, we went behind the back of all of those making money out of doing comparatively little, and befriended the wonderful couple that used to own this place. They made the overtures (similarly, they were trying to retire and beetle off to a hillside in Wales) and we jumped at their kindness. All of a fortnight later, we were in a van filled with the first of five loads of our stuff, which we secreted in their gaff, whilst they were away. We even had a key! This, in turn, meant we could clear the massive garage next door to our old place which was, shortly thereafter, filled to the gunnels with the possessions of our purchasers.

All of this, of course, could have gone radically wrong. BUT, the show of faith in one another carried the day. Legal nit-picking, game-playing and whatnot continued for another six weeks, in a truly depressing and dispiriting way. Lies were told. Exasperation was strongly hinted at in Official Communications. There was, not to put a finer point on it, endless fucking about. However, the three homes all kept in touch with one another, and we continued to discuss what we wanted and how it would work, entirely on our own terms, and out of earshot of those supposedly doing our bidding. And that blind faith and kindness shown to one another carried the day. We just did not budge. We all told those preparing their bills that we all wanted the same thing, and, in the end, made them do it. I am not trying to be unkind, here. Those folks were sat at their dining room tables and in their kitchens, scratching their heads, trying to make a living for themselves. However, their forty days may prove to be our forty years, if you see what I mean?

No one should enter a home they don’t own, and store stuff in it, uninsured. No one should break lockdown law, and hire a van and move stuff about under said lockdown. No one should offer anyone a bed for the night in a property they don’t yet own, unaccompanied. And no one (and I am looking at my beloved here), on the day when the transaction was finalised, should wait for their husband to drive the van back for the last time, and set about the carpets with a Stanley Knife, before being told they were carpets they now owned.

Patience might be a virtue. But here and there, a spot of impatience is no bad thing either. Particularly when it drives a path through the truly odd system we use for buying and selling houses. Will it ever change? That seems unlikely. Have we had enough of it for now? You bet we have. I will have picked many an apple from the tree in the back garden before the notion of ‘gathering some boxes for the move’ is broached again. I like it here. We both do. It’s imperfectly perfect. And I think that’s probably the key to all this – if you are 18 or 80, really. Find where you want to be, and know where you want to go. Speculate to accumulate if you want to – no one will stop you, but we all have to wake up somewhere, and face the oncoming day. Duck the fridges, wrangle the lawyers, load the vans, try to be good, try to be calm, and do not do it more often than you need to.

It’s worth it in the end.

I’m not sure what that was in the end. Part essay, part fluff, and part reminiscence. It’s not the soaring winds of travel madness – nor is it Stuff About Our Dog. But, a lot happens in a life. Back in 2013, I made a big change in mine, and I have just entered the ninth year of that change. So when we return, I shall hold forth with great humour and some introspection ‘on Running’

Stay safe.

Paraguay, a bridge to Brazil, and coffee on a tiny plane

Yes, well, that all took rather too long, now didn’t it? Life, friends. Life. Back to the UK, some fruitless job interviews (one of them back In the Desert), two periods of consultancy, running around in a Christmassy fashion, and all the while painting stuff brown, then subsequently blue for my wife, in the freezing cold (more on that sometime – painting stuff and me is an odd mixture). Oh, and growing what I was previously calling a ‘Festive Beard’, which has now become a 2019 Special Beard (the itchy period being fully over). I finally grew a beard (like my Dad at a similar age) in 2005. As I recall, I started doing so the day after my girlfriend at the time (Sarah the First – remember her?) almost succeeded in helping me decapitate myself whilst shaving. That’s another note of something to tell you that I need to make. We’ve already covered the time she banged an empty wine bottle into my face, of course.

Another birthday has passed (I am now nearer to fifty than forty, and getting closer thereto with every strike of this keyboard). Whilst we await the future professional developments (being on the dole is officially No Fun At All, so I am currently attempting to wheedle my way back into temporary employment at the University of Nottingham), it’s back to doing some blogging. Perhaps more out of hope than anything else, I have committed myself to attempting to put a piece together for every month of this year. So, 11 more after this one. This is part of a raft of other New Year’s Resolutions:

• Read 20 books (closing in on two, just now);
• Run/walk 700 miles (I am on a paltry 78, oh dear of dear);
• Give to charity on a monthly basis (all present and correct); and
• Expand my cooking repertoire (nothing on this yet, but I am dieting vigorously, so that’s a good replacement for now)

Digressions, as ever. If I recall correctly, we had just endured the heart-stopper of a moment that was the cancellation (non-existence, indeed) of my flight from Santiago to Asunción? As has been documented, I punted on an alternative, worked off some of the rage in a burst of administrative activity and eventually hauled myself upstairs to check in. My energy was restored by a full packet of Halls Soothers (painkilling and sugar rushing), from the souvenirs stall.

And so, after six hours at the airport – we did indeed fly to Asunción. Happily this was a quiet affair – my headphones clamped to my nut, I even slept awhile. On arrival at Asuncion I was charmed by the Arrivals Hall in miniature. It’s tiny, and you can see pretty much every working part of the place – right down to the blokes through the hatch launching your luggage onto a conveyor shorter than that at a sushi restaurant.

First job was a quiet word about the day I had had with the staff at Amazonas desk. The young man with sufficiently decent English deputed to talk to me was so thoroughly nice I didn’t have it in me to shout, bawl and act out the anger of earlier in the day. Instead we went through the details of the matter and I was provided with 23469438 links on various website to use. By the time I got back to the UK, just eight weeks later, I was back in funds. They were okay as an airline (and funny, at times, as we are about to see), but I would advise caution. They have a certain monopoly over some routes, and others have read what I felt compelled to write on Trip Advisor (ugh, etc.) and have come forward with much the same complaints.

Anyway, that was soon behind me, and in front of me was a taxi ride. I’d done a bit of reading up about this – taxis being in something of a short supply to and from what is not a busy airport. I was assured that a bit of a monopoly existed off the rank at the airport, and the thing to do was to strike out for the petrol station, conveniently the other side of the muddy, 2857-lane motorway, and jump in a car from there. I did so, as darkness fell.. and got mugged anyway. Initial promises came to nought, as the meter span around at an alarming rate, and I just decided to give up worrying about a bargain in semi-rural Paraguayan fields. However, I was at least blessed with a taxi ride given to me by some manner of distant cousin of Diego Armando Maradona. Four foot ten high, four foot eight wide, and with the wild tufts of middle-aged male hair bursting out through his vestments. He spoke in lively Spanish.. and I did not, but we sussed some stuff out between us. Really, I couldn’t draw my eyes away from the mass of Catholic iconography that framed the windscreen. His battered Ford was a shrine to the Virgin, and whoever the patron saint is of forgetting to turn your lights on, and animatedly sparking-up a ciggie whilst overtaking on corners. You get the drill.

That said, we got there eventually. An enormous hotel suddenly loomed up out of low and battered streets. I was plied with several dozen maps, and carried out an angst-filled discussion about the need for a dawn cab the following day, with rather a careworn young fellow behind the desk, resplendent in one of those little hats that look a bit like a cheesecake, attached with a strap. I resolved to take the matter up with the morning shift, instead, and headed for my room, which boasted a dark chocolate bathroom suite, and cold and cold running water. Like the Argentinian place before it, this was another one of those places that keeps up a fine façade, but that disguises a rather worn and dark heart behind the bedroom door. Not to worry, as I was only going to bunk down for six hours, before getting on a tiny little plane down to the Brazilian border.

A partial unpack followed, with the standard, angsty charging of devices that dominates most of the days of my life, and out I went to explore, and to fill my tummy with other than coffee and cough sweets. Dusk photos were taken through the square. Steak #3 was eaten, entertainingly to the backdrop of a very loud religious youth rally. Lots of teenagers dressed all in white, descending upon a church. I suppose it made a change from NHS-type rallies of Chile, but wondered (as a I reached for a toothpick – Paraguayan steak turned out to be a bit gristly) quite why it was that I continued to stumble my way into these things. Protest is everywhere I go, it seems. It wasn’t over, either – more to follow on that.

My digestive walk was pleasing and contemplative, as I pondered having reached the third of my five countries. Asuncion proved, that night, to be a game of two halves. Warmth and kind service, pretty lights, shops, green spaces, and a pleasing an uncomplicated sense of kindness and no threat. But everywhere the tell-tale signs of poverty were on most corners. Street drinkers, and grown men and women bunking down for the night outside as the temperature plunged. All of a sudden a cold brown shower looked a lot less of a problem. Paraguay is one of the poorest countries in the whole continent. That set aside, so far as that was possible, I looked forward to coming back in another 24 hours or so, after the dash to Brazil.

I slept the sleep of a man who’d been up for 20+ hours and had had a few rather testing things to negotiate. All the same, I was up at first crack to head for the airport once again. The taxi booked the night before showed no sign of appearing, but a nice girl sorted that, and a tall, cadaverous, almost dusty man helped me, unnecessarily, with my bag, as another miniature Catholic Church appeared at the forecourt, and fired us off through a backstreet route out to the motorway road. On the radio? What I can only describe as a Paraguayan Wogan – an unfamiliar tongue, but lots of, hesitating, halting, Deep Vowwwwwel Sounds. Soothing, it was, and softened me up for handing over another inch of banknotes on our arrival at the biddy little airport.

Back to the biddy little National Airport. A spot of kiosk breakfast, and onwards to secure the all-important fridge magnet. For a tiny facility, there were shops everywhere, so I planned out a couple of souvenirs for SWK, and had a second coffee whilst grabbing some more charge and WiFi. My flight was bang on time, and so it was only a short while before I strolled across the tarmac for the shortest flight of my life so far. Scheduled in for 30 minutes, down to the South East of the country, to then effect a crossing of the border into Brazil. I clambered up the steps and into the teensiest little plane I have ever been inside. 36 seats (half full at most), a pilot and one crew member. I noticed for the first time that the planes in this neck of the woods do not have a row number 13. I allowed myself to believe that this was nothing to worry about.. and resisted Googling the matter – surely the plane would fly do low I could probably just jump from it to safety, were the worst to happen? In any case, my safety was assured, as I found that 12D was in a position crushed under the bulkhead, next to a positive Goliath of a man. Sort of chap that could have just kicked the plane into the air, were jet power to be a problem. I figured his body might cradle me, pleasingly like an airbag made flesh, in the event of a crash. Also… he was doing a lot of praying, so I also reasoned the Almighty was going to be on our side, what with the whole omnipotence thing.

Two other highlights, as we zoomed upwards, and across the country to Guarani. The first being the lady serving as the crew member. Kept her coat and handbag on for the duration, and just ran a tiny cart up the middle of the plane, handing out a coffee and a bar of chocolate to anyone who wanted one. Remarkable service, on a flight of such short duration.

Ignoring the prospect of coffee burns, or being bodily melded into a South American weight lifter, I went for an aeroplane playlist on the trusted noise-cancelling headphones:

• Steve Miller Band – Jet Airliner;
• John Denver – Leaving On a Jet Plane;
• Bob Mould – The Descent;
• Tom Petty – Learning to Fly; and…

we were smoothly back to the tarmac to the strains of The Orb’s Little Fluffy Clouds (none of which we had gone above). I’d have done more, but 30 minutes (25, in the end) passes quite quickly.

Into Guarani Airport I wandered. A huge white elephant of a place. Big old warehouse of a building, it was, with nothing much else in sight. Notably, there was a place in the airport selling 655615 varieties of chainsaws, drills, angle grinders and whatnot. Rather an oddity – who supplies maiming and murder implements for people about to get onto a plane the size of a matchbox?

Matters then got a little odder, as I made some new friends.

Having wrestled self and baggage outside, I got to where a couple of taxis idled, and was about to get involved in some negotiations, when a bright young pair of travelers hailed me from behind, asking if I spoke English. It transpired they were a Polish couple, and had been on the same flight as me (the only flight in an out of the day) and were similarly bound for the border town of Foz, in Brazil, so as to position themselves for a run over to the Iguazu Falls. They were keen to split the cost of a cab, had a smattering of the Spanish I did not (I can’t really get beyond yes, no, hello, thanks, the numbers one to four, and ordering chicken and chips for four), and seemed friendly and legitimate.

Handshakes all ‘round, and we sped from the airport to the very fringes of the country. Turned out they were thoroughly agreeable companions. Well travelled, (Mr Poland had done more countries than me, but I have since overtaken him again), and both of them architects. We jabbered most agreeably, until we arrived into a town called Ciudad Del Este, which sits at one side of the Friendship Bridge, which in turn towers over the Parana River, and allows one to walk into neighbouring Brazil. The town was nuts – amazingly busy – it turns out the place is the premier location for buying knock-off ‘high value’ goods across the whole of South America. The chap driving was so keen to take us all the way to Foz that he pulled off onto a side road, and revealed a set of Brazilian taxi signs from the boot, which he slapped onto the vehicle in readiness. We all felt a bit bad about letting him down, even though the evidence suggested he was perhaps playing a bit fast and loose with Taxi Law (if that’s a thing) but instead paid up and clambered up the hill and onto the bridge.

Bridge HQ, on either side, was more of bureaucratic affair than I had bargained for. Frowning officials, reluctant stamping of passports, and feverish searching of one’s bags. I dropped in behind my younger friends, and just did what they did. I was too tired to finish up at gunpoint again – it happens all too often to me, even when I am on my best behaviour. Up on the bridge itself, it was tremendously windy. I stopped at halfway to take a picture, near the very point where the river divides the neighbours:

As I did so, my phone’s clock blinked forward an hour, as we swapped timezones. Country number four had arrived under my feet. I stepped off the bridge, changed some money, hopped into another cab with my chums, and was soon checking in at my lodgings for the night. It having been a long day already, I dozed awhile, as the Sun went down and the night came up.

Later I made it out onto the street to take in what there was of Foz. Not for the first time, I was assaulted on the way, by depictions of the Christ Child and the Virgin, by way of the hotel’s frighteningly gaudy artwork, on this occasion. Near enough a case for sunglasses inside. I gathered myself on the street, bought a simply fabulous fridge magnet (a VW Camper in the colours of the country) and then strode to the bus station, to settle my mind on the travel arrangements for the events to follow the next day. My daily transgression of the lines of authority followed, as it transpired I had walked into the facility The Wrong Way, and had thus effectively “broken into” (their words, not mine – I’d have preferred “incautiously stumbled into”) the bus station without paying for a fare to somewhere. I pleaded Chronic Englishness, and was sent the long way ‘round, to peruse platforms and timetables from the other side of the barriers. So that told me. All appeared well, and so I dropped into the supermarket for some coffee for my Dad, and a general nose at Brazilian life, before I wandered back down to a restaurant called Gaucho, that I had sussed out online a day or two earlier.

A traditional barbecue place, it was. Buy a ticket, get a plate and pop a few nugatory salad leaves on it, pour a glass of water, and await the attentions of staff circulating with frightening platters, bearing phenomenal chunks of recently grilled, roasted, and charred animals. Once in position, they would then cleave from the joint as much or as little as Sir felt he might manage. I felt like Homer Simpson in that episode where he enters a one-on-one competitive steak-eating competition, and his opponent dies. There was simply Too Much Meat available. One was dizzied and intimidated by the choice. I must say that I fell well short of anything record-breaking. Too long a stay seemed certain to bring about some manner of Porterhouse Blue. I chewed modestly, admired the unceasing efforts of others of unaccountable slim stature, but soon took myself off to my hotel. Even after only minimal cuts, I found myself pendulous of gut, much like a leopard after her one mighty meal of the month. I was slick, full and tired as I rolled onto and into my bed, with dreams to come of my adventures underneath the rainbows – of which we will learn next time.

Back soon, then for a piece of the adventures that followed. Working title: Chasing Waterfalls – Human Bacon in Montevideo.

Fearsome football, missing planes, and the perils of politics

On my final day, I decided to go a bit off piste. Undoubtedly, there were other highlights I could have attended to, and niche museums about obscura that I could have failed to fathom. However, I decided, instead, to take an earthier and more blue-collar route into the suburbs. I resolved to make it down to La Boca.

My guide book was quite stern with me about La Boca – an arts and football district, just behind the docks, to the South. The essence of the advice was that it was worth seeing; colour and artwork were promised. However, if the Englishman would care to keep his tendency to ostentation and fannying about to a minimum, the chances of him giving up his camera, remaining Pesos and teeth would be substantially reduced.

I decided to ‘blend in’, and headed out in boots, jeans, a checked shirt and a travel-dusted hoodie. LB looked to be a bit of a trek, and rather up hill and down dale, so I opted to nip over to the main drag and jump on a Metro service to the nearby terminus.

This bought me some initial fun, when it came to getting myself installed with the obligatory Subte card – the Buenos Aires equivalent to an Oyster Card. I approached the ticket booth, and did a reasonable job of making my requirements know. The chap on the till was behind bars (no, really – I was minded of the corner shop near my mate Benj’s flat in Bootle – remember Benj? I sang at his wedding?) and was being guarded by a WPC, who was keeping a bit of an eye on the situation, as I had to lean in a bit to make myself clear. This sort of community policing racket seemed quite common, in BA – the Fuzz were everywhere, with no apparent demand for them or their weaponry. Not a bad gig. She stepped in when he asked her a question or two about what the bloody hell I was on about. Lots of gesticulation, followed – a card burped out of the machine and eventually a very firm and plummy “SEVENTY FIVE” issued from our boy. Trebles all ‘round! I paid up, they looked a bit bewildered, and fell into a concerned discussion about “El Boca?” as I mangled my new Subte card through the reader, before lady cop came and dealt with it for me – it transpired one tapped, rather than fed – it’s still in my wallet now and looks like the dog’s been at it. I walked away to hear more mumbling and shaking heads – I think they’d decided that if I cam back that way it might be kinder for her just to shoot me. Assuming that did not happen at my destination, of course.

I bumbled down to La Boca on the train, and walked the wrong way out of the station into the bright sunshine. I had thought it was a simple stroll into the arts district, skirting the Boca Juniors footy ground on the way, for a bit of lower culture. It wasn’t.

I’ve had some odd encounters and misadventures, when football stadia have been on the menu. I don’t have the obsessive love of the game that some do, but I have managed a bit of tourism, now and again, when not simply on a pilgrimage to Hartsdown Park, to watch my team, Margate FC, strut their stuff. Well, alright, perhaps not strut, strictly speaking. Pass the ball with average competence on a good day would be more likely, if not to say hopeful. A club at their level (currently sort of Division Seven) keeping going for 122 years is pretty remarkable. I cannot claim to have attended, even in embryonic form, on their most famous day – a narrow 6-0 defeat to Tottenham, on 13^th January 1973 in the Third Round of the FA Cup. I was yet to be the glint in my Father’s eye. Still, it’s been a lot of fun over the last 20-some years, when I have gone to games home and away where possible. Speaking of the old man, we both have fond memories of attending a match together against Sittingbourne, in the Winter of 1997. In those days, before the halting progress towards modernisation of the ground began, we played on a pitch that dropped away quite formidably at one end. A year or two later, we signed a player who was the Brother of an Olympic sprinter. Tactics that year were pretty simple, when at home. Someone in the back four would crash it down towards the slope, Leon would chase it down like a greyhound and cross it for Phil Collins (yeah, I know, with his ‘Invisible Touch’ right?) to score.

However on this particular day, we were defending what is known as the Coffin End, and the slope was being exacerbated by what was roughly a 40-50mph wind. One goal kick from Lee Turner swung out onto the field of play, only to be picked up by the tempest, and to whizz out for a corner. Not something you see from behind your prawn sandwich at Old Trafford, that. We won, by the way – two goals from the late Paul ‘Psycho’ Sykes.

But yes, days on the road could be fun. I have misplaced a number of concrete battlegrounds in the Greater London area. My friend Mickey and I managed to walk past Hendon FC twice, not even noticing it was there, and finished up arriving 20 minutes into the match, having stood as lookout for one another so we could go for a much-needed wee down a dark alley just off the North Circular.

Dagenham was the worst experience. And I say that with no little confidence, having been to Grays, Thurrock, Southend, Brentford and Aveley, in my time. In those days, I caught up with old friends Dan and Steve, at a London fixture. We would congregate somewhere, watch the Gate flatter, then flounder, and repair to town afterwards, in time for the cocktail hour. Or lager.

If you haven’t been to Dagenham, then I urge you not to. It’s a combination of the coming Brexit wasteland, matched with a test site for nuclear weapons. Only not as nice.

We congregated at a pub across the road from the ground. Dagenham and Redbridge were on the up, at that stage, with former Chelsea front man Mark Stein in the front line, and a rather determined Manager, a chap with the surname Hill, who never betrayed any secret tendency to bookishness. I was quivering in my Margate fleece from the moment we arrived. As was my wont, back then, I popped fifty pee on the pool table – I played a lot back then – sometimes for money (I’m a man of unfathomable depths). I was roughly informed “Winnah staze on Mayte”, and duly despatched a rather horny handed local.

I headed off for a pee, feeling more chirpy, and was rewarded for my efforts at the urinal, when, as I stood there minding my own business, doing what nature intended, the fellow wandered in and barged me in-between the shoulder blades. I rebounded off the convenience, slid to the ground, and piddle went everywhere.. but I chose not to call the chap to account on his manners. I suspect they would still be writing graffiti in my posthumous honour, had I thought it a good idea. Instead I soggily made my way back out into the ‘snug’ and bade my comrades to leave, and quickly at that. Something in my eye told them the story, and we left – alas, just in time to miss the man who had arrived to sell pornography from a duffel bag.

You’d imagine it couldn’t get worse, but it did. We were herded into the uncovered away end, and went 1-0 down inside five minutes. Then the referee sent our star midfielder off, and an hour or so later we were going down 5-0 in the pouring rain. As we traipsed out, we were hailed from the upper level of the ‘Family Stand’ by the Borough’s finest, bidding us farewell with the ‘wanker’ sign, as their pre-teen children attempt to gob on us.

As I say, it’s an unlovely place. I have other stories – and must come back some time to The Miracle of Harrow, The Purple Vomit of Barnet, and Death Metal in Boston. However, I suppose I should find a little more to say about El Boca, really. I did go an awfully long way to see it, after all.

Disorientated as I was, I set off the wrong way from the station twice and got variously propositioned and scowled at in a scary way. This was lower-class living and it didn’t lack an edge to go with it. My camera stayed in my bag, and my bag wrapped across my body. I applied my hardest Paddington stare. I got down to the fringes of La Boca eventually, but the wrong way ‘round and via a less than scenic route. Rough people cooked meat in the street, wandering dogs made it clear they did not care for me… hmm. I nearly, nearly gave up and ran away, but I went one street and Bingo. I was rewarded by colour and carnival. And Americans with cameras protruding a foot or so outwards from their frontages. I had coffee and a cake and rested my worn-down feet. A palpable sense of relief. I would never do anyone down for being poor and struggling on for survival, but it was at least 8/10 on the scare scale, for a while. So.

Sated and rested, I spent a thoroughly agreeable hour in the colour of the ‘Distrito Des Artes’ neighbourhood. Really very lovely indeed. Lively – arts and crafts-y, pretty as a picture, and with the waterfront ad a backdrop to it. I went on quite the souvenir hunt (my Mother’s going to go nuts for her item, but I can’t tell you what is yet, as my shipping isn’t back in the UK and I am about to publish this) in between snapping away with the camera and soaking it in.

After a time, the sky turned grey, the rain start to dribble, and it was time to go. A second attempt at a short cut worked rather better, and I was up by the stadium in no time. Same thing though – cross one street and walk down the next one and it was as night follows day. Back came the cool sense of threat and unease. Worth seeing though, the Boca Juniors ground. It sits on the corner of the quite two ordinary streets and it is simply towering. Seat Z100 would bring on vertigo in anyone – really quite dizzying, being all the way up there.

Just as I was busy getting lost again, I spotted a bus pull up that was claiming to go my way; I took a chance and jumped on it, exhausting the credit on my Subte card in the process. The world becomes a rather smaller place, once someone takes you on a direct route from A to B. We were back, unmolested, in no time at all. I’d walked a long way, and was exhausted – I dropped into an Argentinian formulation of a 7-11, ate cheese and a rather gristly sausage with a knife I had appropriated from the breakfast room, then scoffed a bar of chocolate in bed (such decadence) and fell asleep reading my book, for I was to rise at 4.15am and swing my way West to Chile.

The following day dawned pleasingly without incident. I was up so early that we sailed out to the airport in no time, and I was left with some local currency to splash on a few trinkets and a coffee for myself. Odd coffee shop though – all staff seemed to be required to wear a flat cap, making them all look like extras on Peaky Blinders.

The flight itself? Uneventful, which is always nice. KLM – for the aviation facts fans – and trust me, in a couple of days we went downhill, rather, when it comes to flights, as you will read at the conclusion of this piece… I watched the Eddie the Eagle Edwards story, and periodically looked up to see a lady in her early 70’s lumbering around the cabin. One of those folk who get up the minute the sign for the seatbelt is extinguished, and only sits down again, briefly, at chow time. She had just the same careworn, one-the-brink-of-disaster aspect of the wonderful Jean Warboys, from One Foot in The Grave:

I did think a bit of comedy on the old in-flight entertainment might give her a bit more pep, but no, she preferred to take her perpetual gloomy roll-call.

Into Santiago, then? A bit of piddling about with forms at Customs, just so as to ensure my hosts that I wasn’t smuggling in anything by way of apples, or cheese, or what have you. After a time, I was engulfed by actual and would-be taxi drivers, but I fought them off and found my way onto a bus. I seem to have spent an enormous amount of time in the last year politely fending off the attentions of taxi drivers. On this occasion one of them even followed me to the cashpoint, and was making moves for the handle of my bag. Making a buck is clearly not that easy, eh?

After about an hour, the bus dropped me off round the corner from my new gaff. Or so I thought. After some Google Maps investigation, it transpired I was still a mile away, but I wanted to walk and enjoy the cool, bright day. Chile was the coldest country I visited, this Summer – one day it got down to just 2 degrees – fully 40 degrees lower than the country I had left. It was lovely.

The first half the mile walk, however, required me to walk in the opposite direction through pretty much the entire nursing population of the Chilean Health Service, who were out on a mass rally/protest, making for the main city square. They seemed a cheery bunch, for protestors. They had balloons, fags on, and some even had a can of beer to hand. Items one and two interfaced at some point or other, which made me jump about eight feet in the air, bringing gales of laughter from a group of uniformed Santiago Sisters. Another sentence that one does not really imagine one is going to utter, in life.

Via cobbled pavements and eternal traffic lights/pedestrian crossing, I finally staggered up to my lodgings. I’d hoped for an early check-in but that was not on the menu, alas. I was feeling a bit cold and sniffly, so I got a recommendation for some hearty Chilean fare, in a location I could bunk down in for a couple of hours before I could claim my room and catch up on some sleep. I left my bag, and went to a nearby Chilean restaurant. Sort of an expanded café – Formica tables, 50’s booths, that sort of thing? On prompting, I ordered and then tucked into a Pastal Da Cuculo. Or something like that. On the menu it looked like it might be some sort of spiced cottage pie – just the job for a chappie on the fringes of a cold.

It was not a cottage pie. Basically, it was a creamed corn-topped pie of indeterminate grey goo, featuring a (whole) boiled egg and a fucking great bone floating around at the bottom. Possibly the bone was off a cuckoo? Alright, probably a chicken. Dashed weird. Edible, but only just the once. I marvelled at the chef, as he took a breather and swung by a couple of times once I had switched to coffee. He looked like a late-era Walter Matthau, and wore a bobble hat. I tarried as long as I could over my coffee, trying to sweat out my symptoms, before gaining access to my room and grabbing a nap and a lovely hot shower.

Later in the day (well, the evening), I had my first foray out into the fading light and the Plaza Des Artes. First photos were taken. Coffee was provided by a nice Chinese lady in a cute little oriental café, where a baby attempted to stare me out, every time I raised lips to latte. Dinner came in the form of economical bits and bobs, via a corner shop. I was suffering, so drugs were taken, and sleep was attended to.

By the next day, I still felt like crap, but was full of a determination to get out and get on. It’s a long way back to Chile from Hucknall, if you realise you’ve missed something. In point of fact, I was the furthest I had ever been from the location of my birth, where I slid silently into the world, on a Winter’s evening in 1974.

Breakfast was the first thing on the list – good coffee (again) and slightly meagre pickings, but I had another good smear of Dulce de Leche, and the unexpected company of Brenda the Footballing Academic. American lady, citizen of New York, Buenos Aires and Santiago, with a Brazilian husband and a line in researching into the development of Women’s Football. She was awaiting a foray to South American football’s HQ, in Paraguay. We talked.. well, we talked football. Blissful, unexpected and fun. One of life’s enthusiastic members, she was.

After a time, I got myself together, and marched along the riverside to San Cristóbal for the promised funicular into the foothills of the Andes. No one loves a funicular more than me. I had no plans to go there, but I had read that there was a zoo halfway up. On a 45-degree slope, no less… I attempted to share my late Grandfather’s joke about it being a special facility for animals with very long pairs of right or left legs, but this humour fell on stony ground, in the considerable queue.

The day’s principal drama began before we had left base cap. A regular feature of my travel arrangements comes in the attempts that I make to lose my lens cap.  In much the same way as I have continually failed to buy an identifying ‘scrunchy’ for my suitcase, I continue to fail to buy one of those little plastic rope loops that attaches the cap to the body of the camera. Actually, I have solved the suitcase matter, by just buying a new suitcase, in such a bilious colour as to identify it from every other, the world over. Anyway – so it follows that on photography days, I will mostly be found patting myself down, or upending the contents of my Man Bag to try and find the crucial little disk. This occasion was no different, and the location in which I had left the cap failed to reveal itself. By the time the queue had snaked ‘round to the reception desk, I had simply given it up, and was quietly cursing myself, wondering where the hell I could get a replacement from. I paid, and we wandered through a series of waist-high metal corridors, the like of which characterise the approach to a fairground ride. I waited near the front with a nice, wholesome young American family. We engaged in chatter, until Dad said to me:

“Hey – I think those folks want you.”

I peered back to where I had come from, and I could see eager waving going on, unmistakeably in my direction. A bit lost for ideas, I waved back.

“Senor! Senor!” they called, pointing at their chests.

I started to wonder if I was a dead ringer for some chap on the Chilean X-Factor.

“No comprendez”, I offered.

Continued pointing, slapping of foreheads, grimacing. What was to be done with this idiot Englishman?

“Sir – they are pointing to where your camera is”, offered Mummy Wholesome American.

“Yes, yes” I came back, stoutly, not caring to be remaindered of my foolishness – “I lost my – oh.”

The Peso had dropped. The had the lens cap. And I looked a thankless arse, as usual.

There followed what I can only describe as an ungainly one-man limbo display, as I contorted myself sideways through a series of barriers back to the holders of the cap. Warm handshakes, grabbing of elbows, apologies, smiles and all sorts followed. Not a dry eye in the house, as the cap was snapped back into place. I reversed my motions, re-joined the very tickled family, and up we went.

A glorious hour followed, with a view across the entire city, and up into the Andean mountain range. Breathtaking stuff, it was. I grabbed a coffee, the standard fridge magnet, and snapped away to my heart’s content, the lens cap in between my teeth, like an Oreo. The view, everywhere, was gorgeous:

I could easily have just spent the day up there, gawping at the Orogenetic Majesty, but down I went, through the University quarter and along to Museo de Artes Visuales (a mixed affair, with a nice video installation), the Barrio Paris/Londres (very pretty, and provided yet another fabulous coffee) and finally ‘Londres 38’ a house that memorialises the loss, torture and murder of the 92 disappeared, in the dark days of the Dictatorships that brutalised the population for decades. Two of the group were young pregnant women, and others just mere children. Sobering. Not a lot more to say, really. Just a moment where you count the many blessings of the time and the location of your birth.

More wandering followed, to get myself another supermarket tea. I wasn’t feeling up to restaurant life, and that weird pie was still lingering in the back of my mind. I found a decent place and got hold of some simple food. Towards of the end of the way through ringing up my purchases, the cashier raised up a bread roll I had selected and bagged.

“Weigh” was the command.

I was just splendidly popular with everyone, when I had to duck back out of the queue, to the rear of the shop, to get my roll weighed and barcoded, before making my way back to the front to conclude matters. I scuttled off to my room and ate, took more drugs, and slept…

… only to be woken at about 3.00am by a piercing scream.

It took a few moments of orientating myself to the gloom before I realised the howl was coming from my bathroom. I leapt from the end of the bed and into the offending area, to find that the hot water tap was on at full gush, with the water heater to the left of it whistling like a kettle and juddering slightly on its bracket. I attempted to right the tap, only to find that it had been off anyway!

Plumbing skills exhausted, I pulled on some shorts and bolted for Reception, to the alarm of the Night Porter having a crafty gasper outside.

“My bathroom is exploding!” I offered.

Moments later we were on the scene, and my saviour wrenched a valve through 90 degrees, bringing silence and a halt to the flow. As I look back on it now, I can see this was perhaps a fairly regular occurrence. Our man was pretty nonchalant.

“Happens sometimes” he said. “Turn it back on for a shower in the morning – we will fix”. He left.

I perspired for a while on the bed, listening out nervously for any signs of an aftershock.  I was soon back into a restive sleep.

Five hours later, after a nervy shower, I was back in the breakfast room. No Brenda to play with, so I fuelled up once again, and then went back to my room to do some preparatory packing for the following dawn. I took to my bed again for a while, until my cold started to lift, and then went out on foot to Mercado Central, for some souvenir shopping and general ducking of invitations into bard to try seafood. Onwards, my route took me along and through the Parque Forestal, which was gorgeous, and into the Museo de Artes Contemporaneo. Fabulous place, it was – all vaults, pillars, checkerboard tiles, and it offered a video called Rhubarb Donkey. Which rather made my day. I took a cuppa on board, and meandered back past the mini mountain of Santa Lucia, a rather higgledy-piggledy former cemetery, and now public park. It used to be three times as big until a chap called O’Higgins cleared it up, only to get sick and die there. His is the only remaining tomb. I ducked into the huge, empty, Cultural Center: a sort of Poundshop Pompidou of a place. My promised dinner at a Peruvian restaurant fell at the first, as the place had folded. In a moment of madness, I returned to where I started (home of the Pie of Insanity) for a somewhat gristly steak and chips. Two countries – two steaks – all was well.

Sleep followed, untroubled by the now, as promised, fixed water supply. I was up at 4.30am to make my way back to the Airport, for the journey into Paraguay. As dawn came up, there were some tiny wisps of snow. I awarded myself Seasoned Traveller Points for managing to find, board and pay for the first bus of the day, and got out to the airport well in time to check in.

At which point, gentle reader, everything went very badly wrong. The first sign of an issue came with my scan of the Departures Board, which revealed no flights with Amaszonas to Asuncion.

I made enquiries with a nice lady on the ‘i’ desk. She indicated it was likely this flight was a codeshare – nothing to worry about. She made a call. Then, on placing the receiver back down, informed me in a matter of fact way that Amaszonas had ceased operations at the whole airport three weeks ago, and there was no flight. Perhaps I might like to look into making alternative arrangements? I whimpered that, yes, I might.

I reflect on those moments with pride. I looked out across the rest of my holiday, and imagined it to be ruined, as I failed to make my various connections, and just had to stay where I was for the next eight days. Simply refusing to be deterred, I went to a nearby desk, to a company called LATAM. To my delight, and my amazement, they had a flight going that afternoon. For what may be the only time in my life, I just bought a flight at an airport. On the face of it, this is quite the stuff of an exciting spy novel. The look of the thing was only spoiled by the fact that I look like a bewildered Geography teacher, rather than Daniel Craig.

I clutched my Boarding Pass, went and breakfasted heartily, and sent some Highly Miffed e-mails. An angle grinder began gently tearing up the floor around me, which rather took the edge of the re-emerging calm. I spent a little time in the loo (another saloon door effort), called my wife, and awaited my new flight. Paraguay was promised….

As I type, I am now in Cyprus, holidaying after the Cox of Arabia episode, and reunited with SWK. Parts Three and Four will shortly follow.